•THE 
MODERN  DRAMA 

An  Essay  in  Interpretation 


BY 

LUDWIG  LEWISOHN,  A.M.,  Litt.D. 

Professor  in  the  Ohio   State  University 


NEW  YORK 
B.  W.  HUEBSCH 

MCMXV 


Copyright,  1915,  by 
B.  W.  HUEBSCH 


Printed  in  U.  S.  A. 


TO  MY  WIFE 


330394 


Im  Grunde  bleibt  kein  realer  Gegenstand 
unpoetisch,  sobald  der  Dichter  ihn  gehorig 
zu  gebrauchen  weiss. 

GOETHE. 


PREFACE 

With  a  few  honourable  exceptions  books  about 
books  are  apt,  at  present  in  America,  to  be  any- 
thing but  critical.  An  account  of  the  modern 
drama,  therefore,  that  aims  at  historical  orderliness 
and  intellectual  coherence  need  not,  perhaps,  offer 
an  excuse  for  its  existence.  My  study  is  not  one 
of  phases  or  aspects  but  of  the  whole  subject  which 
I  have  attempted  to  grasp  and  to  interpret  as  a 
whole.  If  I  have  succeeded  in  any  measure,  this 
volume  should  prove  of  real  usefulness  to  students, 
teachers  and  critics  of  the  drama. 

I  have  omitted  any  discussion  of  the  theatre 
of  Italy  and  Spain.  No  criticism  can  be  fruitful 
which  is  not  based  on  an  intimate  acquaintance 
with  the  idiom  which  that  literature  employs. 
But  this  omission  represents  no  absolute  loss. 
Italy  and  Spain  have  followed  and  exemplified  the 
tendencies  and  methods  of  the  modern  theatre. 
They  have  neither  changed  them  nor  originated 
others. 

With  the  exception  of  a  few  lines  from  The 


PREFACE 

Sunken  Bell,  the  translations  of  all  quotations,  in 
verse  and  prose,  are  my  own. 

This  volume  has  been  written  amid  the  press- 
ing tasks  of  a  busy  teacher  and  editor.  It  owes 
the  possibility  of  its  existence  largely  to  the 
friendly  interest  shown  me  by  Mr.  Julius  Rosen- 
wald  of  Chicago. 

LUDWIG  LEWISOHN. 
Columbus,  O., 

February,  1915. 


CONTENTS 

PREFACE 
CHAPTER  ONE 

THE  FOUNDATIONS  OF  THE 
MODERN  DRAMA 

PAGE 

I    THE  NEW  CONCEPTION  OF  TRAGEDY       .     .       i 

II     THE  SCANDINAVIAN  THEATRE      ....       7 

a)  Henrik  Ibsen 

b)  Bjornstjerne  Bjornson 

c)  August  Strindberg 

III  PLAYS  OF  THE  FRENCH  NOVELISTS  .     33 

a)  The  Goncourt  Brothers 

b)  £  mile  Zola 

c)  Daudet  and  de  Maupassant 

IV  HENRI  BECQUE 39 

V     THE  NEW  STAGES 44 

a)  Theatre  Libre 

b)  Freie  Biihne 

CHAPTER  TWO 
THE  REALISTIC  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE 

I     THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  THE  FRENCH  THE- 
ATRE      47 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

II     THE  PSYCHOLOGISTS 52 

a)  Georges  de  Porto-Riche 

b)  Francois  de  Curel 

III  FRENCH  COMEDY .     63 

Henri  Lavedan 

IV  THE  SOCIOLOGISTS 70 

a)  Eugene  Brieux, 

b)  Paul  Hervieu 

V     THE  HUMANISTS 90 

a)  Jules  Lemaitre 

b)  Maurice  Donnay 

VI     THE  FAILURE  OF  THE  FRENCH  THEATRE     .   100 

CHAPTER  THREE 
THE  NATURALISTIC  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY 

I     THE  RISE  OF  NATURALISM 103 

II     GERHART  HAUPTMANN no 

III  THE   DIL'MA  OF  COMPROMISE     ....    128 

Hermann  Sudermann 

IV  THE  SCHOOL  OF  HAUPTMANN     .     .     .     .   134 

a)  Max  Halbe 

b)  Max  Dreyer 

c)  Georg  Hirschfeld 

V     REVOLUTIONISTS  IN  THE  DRAMA  ....   146 

a)  Otto  Erich  Hartleben 

b)  Frank  Wedekind 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

VI    NATURALISTIC  HUMANISM 154 

Arthur  Schnitzler 

VII    NATURALISM  ONCE  MORE 163 

CHAPTER  FOUR 
THE  RENAISSANCE  OF  THE  ENGLISH  DRAMA 

I     THE  CONDITIONS  OF  THE  ENGLISH  THEATRE  166 

II     PLAYWRIGHTS  OF  THE  TRANSITION     .      .      .    174 

a)  Henry  Arthur  Jones 

b)  Arthur  Wing  Pinero 

III  ARTIFICIAL  COMEDY 189 

Oscar  Wilde 

IV  THE       CULMINATION       OF      INTELLECTUAL 

COMEDY 192 

George  Bernard  Shaw 

V     THE  ENGLISH  NATURALISTS 202 

a)  Granville  Barker 

b)  John  Galsworthy  ^ 

VI     THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  ENGLISH  THEATRE     .  218 

CHAPTER  FIVE 

THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  THE 
MODERN  DRAMA 

I     THE  THEORY  OF  NEO-ROMANTICISM     .      .   220 

II     MAURICE  MAETERLINCK 228 

III    EDMOND  ROSTAND 236 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

IV     THE  GERMAN  MOVEMENT 247 

a)  Gerhart  Hauptmann 

b)  Hugo  von  Hofmannsthal 

V     THE  IRISH  MOVEMENT 265 

a)  William  Butler  Yeats 

b)  Lady  Gregory 

c)  John  Millington  Synge. 

VI    THE  ACHIEVEMENT  OF  NEO-ROMANTICISM  .  274 
STUDY  LISTS 279 

CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY  OF  THE 

MODERN  DRAMA   ....  289 

INDEX 327 


THE  MODERN  DRAMA 


CHAPTER  ONE 

THE  FOUNDATIONS  OF  THE  MODERN 
DRAMA 


THE  dramatic  literature  of  the  last  three  dec- 
ades, which  it  is  the  purpose  of  these  pages  to  de- 
scribe and  to  interpret,  may  be  called  the  mod- 
ern drama  in  no  loose  or  inaccurate  sense.  In  all 
ages  the  drama,  through  its  portrayal  of  the  acting 
and  suffering  spirit  of  man,  has  been  more  closely 
allied  than  any  other  art  to  his  deeper  thoughts 
concerning  his  nature  and  his  destiny.  When, 
therefore,  during  the  third  quarter  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  these  thoughts  underwent  a  pro- 
found and  radical  change,  it  was  inevitable  that 
this  change  should  be  communicated  to  the  drama 
and  should  reshape  its  content,  its  technique  and 

its  aim.     The  result  is  that  art  of  the  theatre  for 

i 


2  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

which  modern  is  the  briefest  and  most  conven- 
ient term. 

Traditionally  the  serious  drama  deals  with  the 
transgression  of  an  immutable  moral  law  by  a 
self-originating  will.  The  tragic  action  began 
with  or,  more  usually,  rose  toward  the  incurring 
of  that  tragic  guilt,  and  ended  with  the  protag- 
onist's expiation  of  his  transgression.  Thence  re- 
sulted the  triple  effect  of  tragedy:  The  compas- 
sion aroused  for  human  frailty,  the  warning 
,  addressed  to  the  equal  frailty  of  our  own  wills, 
and  the  vindication  of  the  moral  order  native  to 
the  spectator  in  that  age  and  country  in  which 
the  tragedy  was  produced. 

This  account  of  the  nature  of  the  historic 
drama  is,  essentially,  the  Aristotelian  one.  It  de- 
scribes, however,  not  only  CEdipus  the  King  or 
the  conscious  imitations  of  the  Attic  stage,  but 
with  equal  exactness  the  great  Shakespearean 
tragedies,  Othello,  Macbeth,  Lear,  and  such  later 
and  inferior  but  still  authentic  examples  of  trag- 
edy as  Schiller's  Wallenstein.  In  each  instance, 
in  the  words  of  the  Sophoclean  chorus: 

"All-seeing  Time  hath  caught 
Guilt,  and  to  justice  brought;" 

*  in  each  instance  the  poet  is  conscious  of  an  abso- 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  3 

lute  moral  order  affronted  by  the  will  of  man;  . 
in  each  instance  the  destruction  of  the  protagonist 
reconciles  the  spectator  to  a  universe  in  which* 
guilt  is  punished  and  justice  is  upheld. 

The  free  scientific  and  philosophical  inquiry  of 
the  later  nineteenth  century,  however,  rendered 
the  traditional  principles  of  tragedy  wholly  ar- 
chaic. It  became  clear  that  the  self-originating^ 
element  in  human  action  is  small.  The  individ- 
ual acts  in  harmony  with  his  character,  which  is 
largely  the  result  of  complex  and  uncontrollable^* 
causes.  It  became  even  clearer  that  among  the 
totality  of  moral  values  an  absolute  validity  can 
be  assigned  to  a  few  only.  Hence  the  basic  con- 
ception of  tragic  guilt  was  undermined  from 
within  and  from  without.  The  transgression  of 
an  immutable  moral  law  by  a  self -originating  will 
was  seen  to  be  an  essentially  meaningless  concep- 
tion, since  neither  an  eternally  changeless  moral 
law  nor  an  uncaused  volition  is  to  be  founijd-ir 
the  universe  that  we  perceive.  _... 

Thus  the  emphasis  of  the  drama  was  shifted 
from  what  men  do^to  what  they  suffej^-  A  ques-f ' 
tioning  attitude  exercised  itself  upon  nature  and 
upon   society.     Tragedy   was   seen  to   arise   not 

the  frailty  or  rebellion  of  a  corrupted  will  • 
ying  the  changeless  moral  order,  but  from  the 


\ 


;v 


4  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

pressure  upon  the  fluttering  and  striving  will  c 
outworn  custom,  of  unjust  law,  of  inherited  ir    ^ 
stinct,  of  malevolent  circumstance.     If  the  sym- 
bol of  historic  tragedy  may  be  found  in  Othello's 
poignant  cry  of  self-accusation: 

"I  kiss'd  thee  ere  I  kill'd  thee; — no  way  but  this, 
Killing  myself,  to  die  upon  a  kiss," 

jwith  its  acquiescence  in  retributive  justice  as  re- 
establishing the  moral  harmony  of  the  world, — 
so  may  the  symbol  of  modern  tragedy  be  found 
in  those  great  words  with  which  Beatrice  Cenci 
goes  to  meet  her  fate : 

"My  pangs  are  of  the  mind,  and  of  the  heart, 
And  of  the  soul;  ay,  of  the  inmost  soul, 
Which  weeps  within  tears  as  of  burning  gall 
To  see,  in  this  ill  world  where  none  are  true, 
My  kindred  false  to  their  deserted  selves, 
And  with  considering  all  the  wretched  life 
Which  I  have  lived,  and  its  now  wretched  end, 
And  the  small  Justice  shown  by  Heaven  and  Earth 
To  me  and  mine;  and  what  a  tyrant  thou  art, 
And  what  slaves  these ;  and  what  a  world  we  make, 
The  oppressor  and  the  opprest  .  .  ." 

j;        For  modern  tragedy  consists  in  man's  failure 
[*to  achieve  that  peace  with  his  universe  which 

marks  the  close  of  GEdipus  the  King  or  of  Othello. 

Such  endings  in  the  drama  correspond  to  a  state 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  5 

of  religious  or  moral  certitude  in  the  playwright 
and  the  audience.  The  loss  of  that  certitude,  the 
crying  out  after  a  reconciliation  with  an  uncom- 
prehended  world — this  it  is  that  constitutes  trag- 
edy in  the  modern  drama.  The  tragic  idea  in 
Ghosts,  in  La  Course  du  Flambeau,  in  Rose 
Bernd,  in  Strife,  is  not  based  upon  a  fearful  sense 
of  human  frailty  or  guilt  and  a  final  acquiescence 
in  its  punishment.  It  is  based  upon  a  vision  of 
the  apparently  "small  justice  shown  by  heaven 
and  earth"  and  of  "what  a  world  we  make,  the 
oppressor  and  the  opprest."  Thence  result  those 
endings  in  the  modern  drama  which  are  still  felt 
by  the  uninstructed  to  be  inconclusive  and  discon- 
certing. But  these  endings  are,  in  the  truest 
sense,  both  artistic  and  philosophical.  They  in- 
terpret our  incertitude,  our  aspiration  and  search 
for  ultimate  values.  Historic  tragedy  deals  with 
man's  disloyalty  to  his  moral  universe  and  the 
re-establishment  of  harmony  through  retribution. 
Modern  tragedy  deals  with  his  perception  of  a 
world  in  which  such  things  can  be  and  such  things 
be  endured  and  in  which,  nevertheless,  he  must 
strive,  if  he  would  live  at  all,  to  be  at  home. 

This  conception  of  the  nature  of  tragedy  made 
for  a  thorough-going  change  in  the  technique  of 
the  modern  drama.  An  ascending  action  that 


IK 


6  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

culminates  in  the  incurring  or  revelation  of  guilt 
and  a  descending  action  that  closes  in  its  expia- 
tion could  no  longer  be  used  in  the  dramatic  in- 
terpretation of  human  life.  The  structure  of  the 

r  drama  becomes  far  simpler,  following  the  nat- 
ural rhythm  of  that  life  itself,  seeking  to  come 
upon  reality  and  understand  some  fragment  of  it, 
hesitating  to  rearrange  the  data  of  experience  in 
the  light  of  an  anterior  ethical  assumption. 

Thus,  too,  in  the  pursuit  of  its  realities  the 
modern  drama  has  had  to  abandon  any  arbitrary 
division  of  the  stuff  of  life  into  sections  fit  or 
unfit  for  artistic  treatment.  For  by  what  cri- 
terion is  such  fitness  or  unfitness  to  be  determined  ? 
Wherever  human  beings  strive  and  suffer  —  there 
is  drama!  And  so  our  playwrights  have  enor- 
mously extended  the  subject-matter  of  the  thea- 
tre, and  have  vindicated  the  spiritual  and  artistic 
values  that  lurk  in  the  common  lives  of  men. 

Such  are  the  primary  characteristics  of  the 
modern  drama  which  the  reader  will  recognise 
again  and  again  in  these  pages  ;  such  are  the  ideas 
and  methods  which  differentiate  it  from  the  drama 

j  of  the  past  —  a  conception  of  tragedy  as  inhering 
in  the  nature  of  things  j^ther  than  ^ 


I 


oFlnen,  a  large  simplicity  of  technique,  the  con- 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  7 

quest  of  vast  regions  of  life  for  the  interpretation 
of,  art. 

II 

The  whole  modern  development  in  the  art  of 
the  theatre  is  prophetically  summed  up  in  the 
career  of  Henrik  Ibsen  (1828-1906).  It  will  be 
seen,  I  think,  when  the  tumult  of  contemporary 
judgment  merges  into  the  quiet  certitude  of  pos- 
terity, that  a  few  of  his  successors  in  the  modern 
drama  have  surpassed  him  in  reality  and  mystery, 
in  sweetness  and  in  insight.  But  behind  them 
and  their  fellows  stands  that  cold,  gigantic  figure 
with  all  the  visions  of  its  age  in  its  unshadowed 
eyes.  Or  all  but  one.  For  there  is,  characteris- 
tically, no  hint  in  Ibsen  of  that  sympathy  with  / 
the  disinherited  of  the  social  order  which  has  so"p* 
deeply  influenced  the  modern  stage. 

He  began  with  plays  in  the  romantic  tradition 
communicated  to  Scandinavia  by  the  Germanised 
Dane,  CEhlenschlager.  Through  the  medium  of 
verse  and  a  semi-romantic  technique,  he  pro- 
ceeded to  embody  the  central  and  controlling  idea 
of  all  his  work  positively  in  Brand  (1866),  nega- 
tively in  Peer  Gynt  (1867).  With  the  one  not- 
able exception  of  Emperor  and  Galilean  (1873) 


8  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

he  now  turned  his  attention  to  the  objective  de- 
lineation of  contemporary  reality.  With  The 
Wild  Duck  (1884)  however,  a  strong  symbolic 
element  begins  to  invade  his  observation  of  the 
actual,  an  element  which  grows  steadily  during 
the  succeeding  years  until  in  his  dramatic  epi- 
logue, When  We  Dead  Awaken  (1899),  it  has 
become  coextensive  with  his  art.  Romanticism, 
naturalism,  symbolism — these  three  stages  mark 
the  history  of  modern  literature  as  they  mark  the 
work  of  Ibsen.  And  this  development  corre- 
sponds to  the  parallel  development  in  modern 
thought  from  the  post-Kantian  idealists,  through 
the  scientific  positivism  of  Comte  and  Spencer, 
to  the  neo-idealism  of  Bergson,  James  and 
Eucken. 

The  modern  drama,  in  its  stricter  sense,  how- 
ever, does  not  arise  until  both  romantic  tech- 
•  nique  and  romantic  philosophy  have  been  more 
or  less  definitely  discarded.  Hence  we  may  dis- 
regard the  plays  of  Ibsen  that  precede  1869.  and 
consider  at  once  the  body  of  dramatic  work  which 
began,  in  that  year,  with  The  League  of  Touth 
and  ended  with  When  We  Dead  Awaken. 

The  initial  impulse  of  Ibsen's  mature  work  was 
an  impulse  of  protest  against  the  social  and  spirit- 
ual conditions  in  his  native  country.  \It  is  fairly 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  9 

easy  to  reconstruct  these  conditions  from  The 
League  of  Touth,  The  Pillars  of  Society  (1877) 
and  from  Bjornson's  The  New  System  (1879). 
There  arises  from  these  plays  the  picture  of  a  L 
small  and  isolated  society  in  a  state  of  cruel  in- 
ternal competition.  Men  s^niggk-  meanly  for 
mean,  advantages;  the  minutest  differences  in 
wealth  and  station  are  emphasised  with  all  the 
bitterness  of  insecurity;  the  whole  social  structure 
is  based  upon  a  rigid  orthodoxy  in  morals  and  re- 
ligion which  maintains  itself  with  the  stealthy 
ferocity  that  belongs  to  growing  impotence  and 
smouldering  panic.  Prosperous  persons  uphold 
a  cast-iron  respectability  that  is  often  at  variance 
with  their  own  past.  [Nowhere  a  breath  of  large- 
ness or  generous  thought  or  free  sincerity;  so  that 
even  unashamed  lawlessness  would  have  cleared 
the  spiritual  atmosphere  made  heavy  and  murky 
by  these  parochial  potentates  and  their  time-serv- 
ers. Therefore  does  the  ultra-idealist  Brand  cry 
out: 

"Even  if  as  slave  of  lust  thou  serve, 
Then  be  that  slave  without  reserve ! 
Not  this  to-day,  to-morrow  that, 
And  something  new  with  each  year's  flight  : 
Be  what  thou  art  with  all  thy  might, 
Not  piecemeal!" 


10  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

And  therefore  Ibsen  declared  in  a  letter  written 
in  1870:  "The  principal  thing  is  that  one  re- 
main veracious  and  faithful  in  one's  relation  to 
oneself.  The  great  thing  is  not  to  will  one  thing 
rather  than  another,  but  to  will  that  which  one  is 
absolutely  impelled  to  will,  because  one  is  one- 
self and  cannot  do  otherwise.  Anything  else  will 
drag  us  into  deception."  It  was  against  such  de- 
ception that  Ibsen's  cold  and  analytic  wrath  was 
turned  to  the  end  of  his  career — deception  that 
was  fostered,  in  Bjornson's  words  "in  small  souls 
amid  small  circumstances  who  develop  wretch- 
edly and  monotonously  like  turnips  in  a  bed." 

By  1870,  then,  Ibsen's  impulse  of  protest 
against  Norwegian  society  had  crystallised  into 
SL  doctrine  of  extraordinary  power  and  import: 
i  "The  great  thing  is  not  to  will  one  thing  rather 
than  another."  l  In  these  simple  words  he  shifts 
the  whole  basis  of  human  conduct,  denies  the  su- 
premacy of  any  ethical  criterion,  social  or  reli- 
gious, sweeps  aside  the  conception  of  absolute 
guilt  and  hence  undermines  the  foundations  of 
the  historic  drama  in  its  views  of  man.  From 
this  negative  pronouncement  he  proceeds  at  once 
to  the  positive.  The  great  thing  is  "to  will  that 
which  one  is  absolutely  impelled  to  will,  because 
one  is  oneself  and  cannot  do  otherwise.  Any- 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  11 

thing  else  will  drag  us  into  deception."  It  is  to 
be  observed  that  Ibsen,  who  began  as  a  romantic 
writer,  does  not  greatly  stress,  theoretically  or  cre- 
atively, the  positivistic  limitations  of  the  human 
will.  He  desires  that  will  to  act  in  utter  free- 
dom, guided  by  no  law  but  that  of  its  own  na- 
ture, having  no  aim  but  complete  sincerity  in  its 
effort  after  self-realisation. 

This  doctrine  which,  embodied  in  play  after 
play,  stirred  and  cleansed  the  spiritual  atmosphere 
of  Europe,  is  not  as  anarchic  as  it  may  superfi- 
cially appear.  For  Ibsen  desires  the  purest  and 
most  ideal  volitions  of  the  individual  to  prevail, 
His  great  and  grave  warning  is  not  to  let  these 
volitions  be  smothered  or  turned  awry  by  mate- 
rial aims,  by  base  prudence,  by  sentimental  altru- 
ism, or  by  social  conventions  external  to  the 
purely  willing  soul.  For  every  such  concession 
leads  to  untruth  which  is  the  death  both  of  the 
individual  and  of  society. 

It  follows  almost  inevitably — for  Ibsen  was 
nothing  if  not  tenacious  and  single  of  purpose — 
that  his  plays  are  a  series  of  culminations,  tragic 
culminations  of  the  effects  of  untruth  born  of 
some  impure  or  materialised  or  basely  intimidated 
will.  And  it  is  almost  equally  inevitable  that 
this  perversion  of  the  will  is  often  illustrated 


12  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

through  the  relation  of  the  sexes  in  which  law  and 
custom,  prejudice  and  social  pressure,  have  most 
tragically  wrenched  the  impulses  of  the  free  in- 
dividual. Thus  Ibsen,  adhering  with  iron  con- 
sistency to  his  central  belief,  inaugurates  all  the 
basic  problems  and  moral  protests  of  the  mod- 
ern drama. 

His  characteristic  theory  of  life  received  its 
first  mature  embodiment  in  The  Pillars  of  Soci- 
ety (1877).  The  worm-eaten  structure  of  Ber- 
nick's  life  which  crumbles  as  the  action  of  the  play 
proceeds,  is  built  upon  the  two  base  refusals  of 
his  youth  to  accept,  with  all  their  consequences, 
the  free  impulses  of  his  personality.  He  denies 
himself  Lona,  the  woman  of  his  true  choice,  and 
throws  upon  another  the  burden  of  his  relations 
with  Mrs.  Dorf.  Not  the  error  of  his  passion,  be 
it  observed,  contributes  to  his  downfall,  but  his 
cowardice  in  face  of  the  realities  of  his  own  soul. 
By  various  dramaturgic  methods,  to  be  noted 
presently,  the  brittle  quality  of  his  existence  is 
brought  home  to  him.  His  purification  cul- 
minates in  the  vital  saying:  "The  spirit  of  truth 
and  the  spirit  of  freedom — these  are  the  pillars 
of  society." 

In  A  Doll's  House  (1879)  Ibsen  illustrated  his 
theory  of  life  through  a  subtle  inversion  of  his 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  13 

method.  The  culmination  here  consists  in  Nora's 
awakening  to  the  fact  that,  dazed  by  social  con- 
ventions, by  the  traditions  of  the  sheltered  life 
and  its  ignorance,  she  has  never  been  able  to  be 
a  freely  willing  personality.  Hence  she  discards 
a  past  woven  of  actions  and  acquiescences  which 
are,  in  no  deep  or  intimate  sense,  her  own.  But 
Ibsen  returns  to  his  more  usual  procedure  in  his 
tragic  masterpiece  Ghosts  (1881).  The  more 
than  Thyestian  horrors  of  that  brief  and  fateful 
action  spring  pitilessly  from  a  concession  to  that 
external  social  morality  which  the  blind  world 
approves.  This  is  the  lesson  which,  through  the 
silent  years,  has  burned  itself  into  Mrs.  Alving's 
soul.  She  shrinks  from  nothing,  now,  that  soci- 
ety abhors.  But  it  is  far  too  late.  Duty  and 
piety  throttled  her  will  in  the  crucial  moments  of 
the  past.  She  can  but  watch  the  bursting  of  their 
dreadful  fruit.  In  the  polemic  Enemy  of  the 
People  (1882)  the  conspiracy  of  an  entire  soci- 
ety against  an  undaunted  will  is  shown,  and  the 
play  ends  upon  the  magnificent  and  characteristic 
note:  "He  is  the  strongest  man  in  the  world  who 
stands  alone."  The  Wild  Duck  (1884)  exhibits, 
not  too  clearly  or  powerfully,  a  variety  of  char- 
acters corrupted  by  insufficient  sincerity  of  free 
self-hood.  Rosmersholm  (1886),  on  the  other 


14  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

hand,  is  but  slightly  touched  with  Ibsen's  finer 
qualities  as  a  thinker  and  dramatic  artist.  It  is, 
at  bottom,  a  conventional  tragedy  of  fate  and 
crime  and  retribution,  distinguished  only  by  the 
subtler  timbre  of  his  workmanship. 

It  is,  perhaps,  not  without  some  special  sig- 
nificance that  after  the  disloyalty  committed 
against  his  nobler  and  more  enduring  method  in 
Rosmersholm,  Ibsen  should  have  given  his  cen- 
tral doctrine  its  purest  and  most  exquisite  expres- 
sion in  his  next  play:  The  Lady  from  the  Sea 
(1888).  The  play  is,  in  truth,  the  key  to  his 
work  by  virtue  of  its  clear  and  almost  poetical 
expression  of  his  dominant  mood  and  doctrine. 
The  fable  is  of  the  utmost  simplicity;  the  sym- 
bolism is  not  only  searching  but  clear.  Never  as 
in  the  more  famous  Master  Builder  (1892)  is  the 
meaning  distorted  by  misleading  and  contradic- 
tory elements.  The  lure  of  the  sea  which  Ellida 
Wangel  feels  is  the  call  of  freedom;  the  Stranger 
is  the  projection  of  her  untrammelled  will.  She 
had  not  followed  Wangel  at  the  dictate  of  a  na- 
tive impulse.  Hence  she  is  not  acclimated  to  the 
life  of  her  home,  and  all  the  unlived  possibil- 
ities of  a  freer  choosing  tug  at  her  heart.  That 
psychical  strain  necessarily  culminates  in  a  situa- 
tion symbolised  by  the  last  coming  of  the 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  15 

Stranger.  As  Ibsen  most  truly  points  out:  no 
soul  can  rob  another  of  its  freedom  of  choice,  but 
can  at  most  brutally  prevent  the  translation  of 
choice  into  action.  A  gleam  of  that  truth  comes 
to  Wangel.  Sincerely  he  offers  Ellida  her  lib- 
erty at  the  final  moment  and,  free  at  last  to 
choose,  she  seeks  the  security  of  a  familiar  home, 
and  the  wild  lure  of  the  great  sea-spaces  can 
trouble  her  no  more. 

No  hint  of  his  deeper  purpose  is  to  be  found 
in  the  carefully  elaborated  portrait  of  that  ignoble 
egotist  Hedda  Gabler  (1890),  and  not  more  than 
broken  hints  in  the  curiously  overrated  Master 
Builder.  The  play  has  passages  that  promise 
momently  to  exhale  a  haunting  power,  a  subtle 
truth.  But  they  never  do.  The  symbolism  radi- 
ates a  feeble  and  flickering  light  in  several  direc- 
tions which,  in  the  last  analysis,  illuminates  noth- 
ing. It  is  possible  to  whet  one's  cleverness  on 
The  Master  Builder,  not  to  impart  to  it  a  steadi- 
ness of  aim  and  execution  that  is  not  there. 

In  his  last  three  plays  Ibsen  returns  to  his  char- 
acteristic motives.  The  tragedy  of  Little  Eyolf 
(1894)  is  ultimately  rooted  in  the  fact  that  All- 
mers  drifted  into  his  marriage  with  Rita  and  did 
not  purely  choose  her  from  all  the  world:  the 
quaint  and  sombre  happenings  in  John  Gabriel 


16  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

Borkman  (1896)  can  all  be  traced  to  the  days 
in  which  Borkman  denied  his  profoundest  impulse 
and  sold  Ella  for  the  mean  advantages  of  the 
world;  the  sick  souls  of  Rubeck  and  Irene  in 
When  We  Dead  AWaken  (1899)  die  because  they 
had  denied  their  real  selves.  "What  is  irrevocable 
we  see  only  when  we  dead  awaken."  Maja  and 
Ulfheim,  on  the  other  hand,  find  an  abundant  life 
even  in  the  death  of  the  body  because  they  meet 
that  death  in  a  union  of  complete  self-affirma- 
tion. They  have  "willed  that  which  they  were 
absolutely  impelled  to  will,  because  they  were 
themselves  and  could  not  do  otherwise." 

The  very  literally  epoch-making  trenchancy  of 
Ibsen's  revolt  against  the  accepted  morality  of 
social  man  is  somewhat  obscured  by  the  quietness 
of  his  manner.  His  medium  is  strangely  unem- 
phatic;  his  rebels  strangely  unimpassioned.  The 
cry  of  Nora  is  the  most  ringing  in  all  his  plays 
and  it  is  by  no  means  the  most  convincing.  Re- 
becca West  and  Rita  Allmers  are  deeply  shaken, 
but  they  are  shaken  by  the  desires  of  love,  not  by 
the  love  of  their  free  desires.  Nevertheless,  the 
eminent  Norseman's  contribution  to  the  guidance 
of  modern  life  is  unmistakable  in  its  final  clear- 
*  ness.  The  denial  of  one's  sincerest  self,  even 
though  made  in  the  service  of  what  men  call  mor- 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  17 

ality  and  institute  as  law,  is  an  unmixed  evil.  It 
corrupts  the  soul  that  is  guilty  of  it  and  infects 
others.  Society  cannot  be  purified  until  it  is  a 
society  of  free,  self-directing  personalities. 

This  theory  of  life  is,  of  course,  like  every 
other,  insufficient,  and  stresses  some  human  qual- 
ities at  the  expense  of  others.  The  greater  num- 
ber of  human  aims  must  necessarily  be  collective 
and  requires  a  measurable  restraint  and  a  directing 
of  the  individual  impulse.  It  is  open  to  small 
doubt,  on  the  other  hand,  that  Ibsen's  gospel  of 
the  free  personality  swept  like  a  current  of 
cleansing  autumn  storm  into  the  prejudice  and 
convention-ridden  life  of  the  great  middle  classes 
through  the  eighteen-hundred  and  seventies  and,  , 
eighties,  and  that  he  is  still  an  awakener  and  a  J 
herald  of  liberty  and  sincerity  in  the  personal  life.  ' 
Nor  is  his  influence  likely  to  decrease.  Democ- 
racy which  began  by  liberating  man  politically 
has  developed  a  dangerous  tendency  to  enslave 
him  through  the  tyranny  of  majorities  and  the 
deadly  power  of  their  opinion.  These  majorities 
pass  restrictive  laws  which  sap  the  moral  fibre  of 
society  and  seek  to  reduce  it  to  the  standards  of  " 

'  \  r****, 

its   most   worthless   elements.     They   abhor   the  ^ 
free     and     self -originating     soul — the     solitary 
thinker,   fighter,   reformer,  saint — and  exalt  the 


i8  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

colourless  product  of  the  uniform  herd.  In  a 
society  face  to  face  with  such  dangers  the  works 
of  Ibsen  have  an  inestimable  service  to  perform. 
They  will  continue  to  shape  free  personalities  and 
help  such  personalities  to  find  themselves. 

In  his  character  as  a  dramatic  artist  I  am  in- 
clined to  question  the  perfection  which  modern 
criticism  is  wont  to  ascribe  to  Ibsen.  His  work- 
manship, in  reality,  is  very  unequal,  ranging 
from  the  pure  and  proud  austerity  of  Ghosts  to 
the  trivial  intrigue  in  The  Pillars  of  Society  and 
John  Gabriel  Borkman,  at  both  extremes  of  his 
career.  In  the  former  play  the  procession  in  hon- 
our of  Bernick  at  the  moment  when  he  has  awak- 
ened to  the  hollowness  of  his  life,  the  song  that 
announces  the  departure  of  the  unseaworthy  ship, 
the  dreadful  suspicion  that  Dina  and  John  have 
embarked  on  it,  the  actual  embarkation  and  im- 
mediate rescue  of  Olaf — all  these  are  structural 
tricks  of  the  crassest  kind  and  derived  from  the 
creaking  mechanism  of  the  theatre  according  to 
Sarcey.  Hardly  less  factitious  are  the  elements 
of  dark  intrigue  that  are  finally  disentangled  in 
John  Gabriel  Borkman.  And  even  in  Little 
Eyolf  Ibsen  stoops  to  the  devices  of  unexpectedly 
discovered  documents  holding  a  melodramatic 
revelation,  and  of  a  sudden  psychical  turn-about 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  19 

on  the  part  of  Rita  for  the  sake  of  a  satisfactory 
and  quite  unbelievable  ending.  Nor,  finally,  can 
it  be  forgotten  that  the  feverish  suspense  during 
long  passages  of  A  Doll's  House  is  sustained  by 
the  external  and  time-honoured  device  of  a  letter 
known  to  be  on  its  fatal  mission,  and  that  the 
last  three  acts  of  Rosmersholm  are  structurally 
the  gradual  revelation  of  an  antecedent  crime. 

No,  Ibsen  was  not  an  impeccable  technician. 
Never,  at  any  period  of  his  career,  did  he  long 
free  himself  from  the  mechanical  structure,  the 
fortuitous  externalities  of  the  older  French  stage. 
Nevertheless,  he  was  in  his  own  time  the  earliest 
and  the  greatest  master  of  modern  dramaturgy. 
And  he  produced  at  least  one  faultless  master- 
piece in  Ghosts. 

His  very  great  and,  for  their  time,  quite  new 
achievements  as  a  dramatic  artist  consist  in  his 
structural  economy,  his  rejection  of  formal  ex- 
position, his  creation  of  atmosphere,  and  his  ad- 
herence to  the  rhythm  of  the  drama.  He  gains 
intensity  by  concentration,  not  by  noisy  climaxes 
or  rattling  curtains.  In  The  Pillars  of  Society ', 
Hedda  Gabler  and,  practically,  in  Rosmersholm^ 
he  preserves  the  unity  of  place;  in  A  Doll's 
House,  Ghosts  and  John  Gabriel  Borkman,  the 
unities  of 'both  time  and  place.  That  the  mod- 


20  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

ern  drama,  seeking  to  produce  the  illusion  of  real- 
ity, should  return  to  the  pseudo-Aristotelian  uni- 
ties was  natural.  And  in  this  drama  they  assume 
a  new  function  and  a  new  importance  which  Ibsen 
was  the  first  to  exemplify.  Equally  notable  is 
his  rejection  of  the  older  method  of  formal  ex- 
position. That  convention  permitted  characters 
at  the  opening  of  a  play  or  act  to  relate  to  each 
other,  but  for  the  benefit  of  the  audience,  facts 
of  which,  by  the  very  assumptions  of  the  action, 
they  were  thoroughly  aware.  The  scenes  between 
the  Marquis  de  Presle  and  his  friend  in  the  first 
act  of  Augier's  Le  Gendre  de  M.  Poirier  furnish 
a  classical  example  of  this  convention.  It  is  in- 
structive, by  contrast,  to  observe  the  method  of 
exposition  used  in  Ghosts.  The  facts  which  the 
audience  must  know  in  that  play  are  the  true  char- 
acter of  Alving,  the  nature  of  Oswald's  malady 
and  the  origin  of  Regina.  Now  these  facts  are 
communicated  to  the  audience  by  being  tragically 
and  inevitably  revealed  to  characters  necessarily 
ignorant  of  them.  Thus  in  the  first  act  Manders 
learns  the  story  of  Alving' s  real  life;  in  the  sec- 
ond act  Mrs.  Alving  is  told  the  secret  of  Os- 
wald's heritage;  in  the  third  act  Regina  is  en- 
lightened as  to  her  parentage.  There  is  no 
speech  or  gesture  directed  at  the  audience.  The 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  21 

drama  has  withdrawn  into  its  own  intense  reality 
and  is  no  longer  heard  but  overheard.  | 

Ibsen  is  the  creator  or,  at  least,  the  first  con- 
stant practitioner  of  the  elaborate  ^igp-rlirprrion, 
by  which  the  modern  dramatist  seeks  to  fix  the 
aspect  and  mood  of  the  environment  in  which  his 
people  act  and  suffer.  In  his  use  of  them,  these 
directions  do  not  yet  attain  that  blending  of 
largeness  in  purpose  and  exactness  in  detail  given 
them  by  the  later  naturalists.  Nor  have  his 
scenes  their  variety  and  warmth.  Even  the 
ocean,  which  glimmers  so  often  in  the  background 
of  his  settings,  has  not  the  multitudinous  energy 
and  grandeur  of  a  living  sea.  It  is  still  and 
brackish,  and  there  are  no  stars  over  it.  But  in 
the  matter  of  stage-direction,  as  of  economy  in 
structure,  organic  exposition  and  a  continuity  of 
dramatic  rhythm  unbroken  by  "asides"  or  mono- 
logues or  scene-divisions,  Ibsen  has  the  priority, 
and  maintains  his  prophetic  station  in  the  history 
of  the  modern  stage. 

According  to  a  current  and  popular  critical 
error  which  merges  the  dramatist  into  the  superior 
stage-carpenter,  dialogue  is  the  least  considerable 
element  in  the  making  of  a  play.  A  moment's 
unprejudiced  reflection  will  at  once  reveal  the  fact 
1  that  it  is  the  one  permanent  quality  in  dramatic 


\ 
^ 


22  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

art.  The  fable  and  the  structure  of  the  drama 
both  undergo  inevitable  changes  from  age  to  age 
with  the  change  of  manners,  interests,  and  with 
successive  transformations  in  the  mechanism  of 
theatrical  production*  In  the  dialogue  are  crys- 
tallised the_abidjng  elements  of  the  _drama — the 
projection  of  character,  and  the  terms  upon  which 
the  spiritual  struggle  of  the  characters  is  enacted. 
It  is  by  virtue  of  the  expressiveness  of  their  me- 
dium that  Electra,  Hamlet,  Le  Misanthrope,  and 
even  The  Weavers  are  not  only  for  an  age  but 
for  all  time.  And  it  is  by  his  failure  in  dialogue 
that  Ibsen  misses  greatness  as  a  dramatist.  Not 
that  dialogue  need  be  beautiful  or,  in  any  con- 
ventional sense,  eloquent.  The  piercing  reality 
of  dramatic  speech  found  in  a  few  of  the  modern 
naturalists,  with  its  intense  embodiment  of  human 
sorrow  and  human  aspiration,  has  a  grave  and 
searching  beauty  of  its  own.  Ibsen's  dialogue 
has  neither  high  poetry  nor  dense  reality;  he  has 
neither  poetically  interpreted  nor  faithfully  imi- 
tated the  speech  of  men.  His  characters  dis- 
course in  curiously  level  tones,  with  their  vision, 
apparently,  always  fixed  upon  some  blankness  in 
space  and  never  passionately  arrested  by  the  busi- 
ness in  hand.  A  play  of  Ibsen's  acted  in  any 
language,  seems  at  once  to  infect  the  actors  with 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  23 

that  insidious  monotony.  They  speak  like  som- 
nambulists, without  modulation  or  fervour.  I 
have  used  the  word  unemphatic.  It  returns  to 
the  mind  often  in  dealing  with  Ibsen.  I  can 
think  of  no  writer  of  equal  rank  in  the  history 
of  literature  so  lacking  in  energy,  in  passion  and 
in  charm.  Yet  there  he  stands  in  his  cold  sturdi- 
ness,  dominating  and  foreshadowing  the  whole  of 
the  modern  drama  by  his  priority  in  untheatrical 
severity  of  craftsmanship,  and  by  the  magnificence 
of  his  moral  protest — to  be  surpassed,  perhaps  al- 
ready surpassed,  by  the  men  who  were  to  come 
after  him,  but  never  to  be  neglected  or  set  aside. 

Like  his  greater  contemporary  and  country- 
man, Ibsen,  Bjornstjerne  Bjornson  (1832-1910), 
began  as  a  romantic  playwright.  Again  like  Ibsen 
he  felt  the  impact  of  realism  that  marked  the 
mid-century  and  produced  The  Newly  Married 
Couple  in  1865.  The  poet  and  dreamer  in  him 
occasionally  came  to  the  foreground,  as  in  The 
King  ( 1877)  ;  but,  upon  the  whole,  Bjornson  may 
be  classed  among  the  realists  of  the  modern 
drama. 

His  character  as  a  man  and  artist  is  not  diffi- 
cult to  disengage.  He  lacked  Ibsen's  incisive  in- 
telligence; he  was  the  burly,  boyish  enthusiast  of 


24  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

peace,  progress,  purity — of  all  the  fine,  intoxicat- 
ing symbols  of  the  social  awakening  of  his  day, 
rarely  penetrating,  I  think,  beyond  the  word  and 
the  obvious  glow  and  dreams  which  it  induced. 
He  was  generous,  kindly,  chivalric,  patriotic — 
far  more  eager,  in  Bishop  Wilson's  great  saying, 
to  live  up  to  what  light  he  had,  and  clamorously 
to  make  it  prevail  than  to  question  whether  that 
light  was  not,  after  all,  darkness.  The  contem- 
porary praise  and  popularity  of  such  a  character, 
aided  by  a  pleasing  personality  freely  displayed, 
was  inevitable.  It  is  equally  inevitable  that  a 
critical  adjustment  of  his  qualities  and  position 
should  follow. 

Largely,  and  from  the  first,  he  was  a  propa- 
gandist through  the  medium  of  the  stage.  Yet 
for  this  special  task  his  natural  endowment  was 
the  most  inadequate.  His  thinking  is  never 
close;  his  vision  of  life  is  never  unblurred  by  his 
moral  enthusiasm.  It  is  easy  to  imagine  how  M. 
Paul  Hervieu  would  shatter  the  amiable  dra- 
matic assertions  of  Bjornson.  A  Gauntlet 
(1883)  illustrates  his  qualities  as  a  thinker  and 
artist.  The  structure  is  effective  without  being 
unduly  theatrical.  The  second  act,  it  is  interest- 
ing to  observe,  ends  with  a  cry  that  is  literally 
and  dramaturgically  identical  with  the  cry  that 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  25 

ends  the  second  act  of  M.  Brieux's  Les  A  varies 
(Damaged  Goods}.  The  characters  in  A  Gaunt- 
let are  not  without  reality  or  charm.  But  the 
theme  of  the  play  is  the  iniquity  of  the  double 
standard  of  sexual  morality.  Now  this  is  a  ques- 
tion of  quite  enormous  difficulty.  For  the  double 
standard  has  not  been  established  by  an  act  of  the 
human  will;  it  is  the  result  of  vast  and  ancient 
forces,  biological,  moral  and  economic,  which 
have  been  operative  throughout  human  history 
and  are  operative  to-day.  Hence,  to  deal  with 
the  problem  it  is  necessary  to  betray  a  conscious- 
ness, at  least,  of  these  forces,  and  to  discuss  their 
possible  deflection.  Bjornson  does  nothing  of 
the  kind.  He  has  discovered  a  wrong,  an  ap- 
parent lack  of  equity  in  human  life,  and  he  pro- 
ceeds to  demolish  it  outright.  Alfred  Christen- 
sen,  despite  the  fact  that  he  has  had  a  mistress, 
declares  that  he  loves  Svava  truly  and  faithfully. 
And  Svava's  mother  asks:  "Suppose  a  woman, 
under  the  same  circumstances,  had  come  and  said 
the  same  thing — who  would  believe  her?"  And 
Bjornson  was  quite  oblivious  of  the  fact  that  the 
problem  had  not  even  been  touched  until  one  had 
accounted  for  the  immemorial  instincts  and  tra- 
ditions, common  to  all  mankind,  which  would 
dictate  the  answer  to  Mrs.  Riis's  question.  Such 


26  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

doctrinaire  dealing  with  life  is  really  a  remnant 
of  the  old  romanticism  on  its  side  of  social  and 
ethical  theorising. 

Bjornson  was  happier  in  the  treatment  of  more 
solid  and  less  debatable  subjects.  Thus  A  Bank- 
ruptcy (1874)  is  vigorous  and  convincing.  It 
has  some  of  the  stuff  of  human  life  in  it  and  has 
been  the  most  successful  of  his  plays.  His  mas- 
terpiece, on  the  other  hand,  is  probably  the  first 
part  of  Beyond  Our  Strength  (1883).  Here  he 
grasped  a  situation  and  a  problem  of  high  spirit- 
•  ual  import.  No  solution  was  possible.  But  the 
statement  is  dramatic  and  poetic  at  once.  Of  es- 
pecial charm  and  truth  is  the  discussion  of  the 
clergymen  in  the  second  act.  Nowhere  else  does 
Bjornson  feel  and  reason  with  such  delicate  just- 
ness. His  religious  perceptions  had  deeper  roots 
than  his  sociological  opinions.  Hence  this  dra- 
matic apologue  of  the  relations  of  Christianity  to 
the  miraculous  is  his  least  questionable  contribu- 
tion to  the  modern  drama. 

Bjornson' s  dramatic  craftsmanship  is  usually 
sound,  if  rarely  remarkable.  His  best  plays  are 
solidly  built;  his  dialogue  is  adequate  if  no  more. 
But  nowhere,  except  in  Beyond  our  Strength,  does 
one  feel  oneself  in  the  presence  of  that  high  in- 
tensity which,  whether  in  the  reproduction  or  in- 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  27 

terpretation  of  life,  is  the  mark  of  every  great 
dramatic  impulse  or  method. 

The  circle  of  the  moderns — from  romanticism 
through  naturalism  to  symbolism — was  also  de- 
scribed by  August  Strindberg  ( 1 849- 1912).  But 
the  heart  of  his  immense  productivity  lies,  I  take 
it,  in  his  naturalistic  period.  His  symbolism 
dislimns  into  mere  phantasmagoria.  But  between 
1887  and  1897  he  wrote  a  group  of  plays  which 
belong  to  the  most  memorable  products  of  the 
naturalistic  drama. 

One  cannot  span  that  tortured  and  potent 
spirit  by  a  formula  or  a  phrase.  The  secret  of 
his  uncanny  power,  however,  lay  clearly  in  his 
unequalled  capacity  for  suffering.  "Observa- 
tion," Balzac  wrote  to  Mme.  Hanska,  "springs 
from  suffering.  Our  memory  registers  only  what 
gives  us  pain."  Strindberg's  memory  clung  with 
a  cruel  and  self -tormenting  tenacity  to  what  had 
given  him  pain.  The  result  is  an  observation  of 
life  from  which  we  avert  our  eyes — shamed  by 
its  merciless  truth.  No  dream  or  delusion  could 
corrupt  that  soul  made  remorseless  by  its  own  an- 
guish. He  lays  bare  his  characters  nerve  by 
nerve  and  in  each  nerve  laid  bare  is  also  the 
quiver  of  Strindberg's  agony. 


28  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

His  art— the  art  of  The  Father  (1887),  Com' 
rades  (1888),  Miss  Julia  (1888),  Creditors 
(1890),  The  Link  (1897) — is  the  most  joyless 
in  the  world.  There  is  no  lifting  of  the  soul  to 
a  larger  vision  from  the  bondage  of  immediate 
pain.  That  is  his  limitation.  It  may  be  urged, 
on  the  other  hand,  that  the  pain  he  describes  is 
so  keen  and  absorbing  that  it  gives  his  characters 
no  chance  to  fight  their  way  to  the  breathing  of 
an  ampler  air.  And  that,  too,  is  life.  For  he 
has  chosen  to  depict  the  crudest  malady  of  the 
age — the  malady  that  has  stolen  into  the  ancient 
and  honourable  relations  of  the  woman  to  the 
man. 

He  began  with  the  severest  consequence  of  this 
malady,  which  Hauptmann  has  also  treated.  So 
soon  as  the  woman  loses  her  sense  of  the  man  as 
friend,  protector  and,  in  the  last  analysis,  arbi- 
ter, she  is  in  the  individual  case  stronger  than  he. 
Not  the  wife  of  the  navvy;  but  the  wife  of  the 
thoughtful  gentleman,  inhibited  by  ages  of  chiv- 
alric  forbearance  and  defenceless  against  a  primi- 
tive craft  and  tenacity  which  he  has  long  out- 
lived. Thus,  in  The  Father^  the  man's  will,  the 
highest  expression  of  his  selfhood,  is  gradually 
corroded  as  by  slow  acid.  As  the  captain  says  to 
his  wife  Laura:  "Yes,  you  have  a  diabolical 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  29 

power  of  making  your  will  prevail;  but  such 
power  always  belongs  to  him  who  shrinks  from  no 
tactics."  We  are  told  that  when  Laura  was  a 
little  girl  she  used  to  feign  death  to  have  her  will. 
No  doubt  small  boys  are  self-willed  too.  But  as 
the  male  grows  older  he  realises  the  compacts  of 
society  and  the  necessity  for  comradely  human  ac- 
tion. He  fears  injustice.  The  woman,  trag- 
ically often,  continues  the  tactics  of  the  child  and 
has  the  power  of  all  unscrupulous  and  irrational 
forces.  It  is  characteristic  of  the  situation  that 
the  pivot  of  the  struggle  is  the  daughter  of  the 
captain  and  Laura.  The  captain  desires  to  train 
Bertha  for  her  own  good;  Laura  to  satisfy  the 
girl's  trivial  desires  and  assert  the  ownership  of 
her  own  motherhood. 

Miss  Julia  is  inferior  to  The  Father  in  power 
and  interest  largely  because  the  case  it  states  is 
highly  exceptional.  And  this  order  of  art  tri- 
umphs by  the  representative  power  of  its  con- 
crete subject-matter.  That  power  reasserts  itself 
in  Comrades^  the  acutest  study  in  the  modern 
drama  of  the  gross  delusion  that  marriage  is  pos- 
sible on  a  basis  of  personal  and  professional  sepa- 
rateness.  For  marriage,  as  Axel  says  in  the  play, 
must  be  founded  upon  common  interests,  not  upon 
conflicting  ones.  And  these  common  interests,  in 


30  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

normal  and  healthy  unions,  must  be  the  home, 
the  child  and  the  man's  work  upon  which  the 
home  and  the  family  and  all  the  historic  civilisa- 
tion of  mankind  are  built.  Here,  on  the  con- 
trary, is  comradeship.  Yet  Berta  does  not  even 
play  that  miserable  game  fairly.  What  woman, 
with  the  traditions  of  the  sex  behind  her,  could? 
And  so  while  Axel  does  hack-work  to  pay  the 
butcher  and  baker,  she  works  at  her  art.  The 
man  finally  gathers  strength  to  escape. 

The  Maid:     A  young  lady  is  waiting  to  see  you,  sir. 

Axel:     Very  well;  I'm  at  her  service. 

Berta:     Is  that  a  new  comrade*? 

Axel:     No,  not  a  comrade,  but  a  sweetheart! 

Berta:     And  your  future  wife? 

Axel:  Perhaps!  I  like  to  meet  a  comrade  at  an  inn; 
at  home  I  want  a  wife.  Excuse  me ! 

Berta:  Good-by,  then.  And  so  we  are  never  to  meet 
any  more? 

Axel:     Why  not?     But  only  at  an  inn.     Good-by! 

Creditors  is  a  variation  on  the  same  theme,  even 
subtler  and  more  searching  in  its  analysis,  though 
not  so  representative.  Despite  the  passionate  ex- 
aggeration of  a  soul  that  has  suffered,  Gustav 
succeeds  in  summing  up  the  whole  matter.  "For, 
look  you,  the  woman  is  the  man's  child.  If  she 
doesn't  become  his,  he  becomes  hers  and  then  we 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  31 

have  a  topsy-turvy  world."  And,  finally,  in  a 
sadder  and  mellower  mood  Strindberg  once  more 
exposed  the  utter  misery  of  a  modern  "free"  mar- 
riage in  that  masterpiece  of  dramaturgy  and  psy- 
chology, The  Link. 

"There  are  disharmonies  in  life,"  says  Gustav 
in  Creditors,  "that  cannot  be  resolved."  Such  dis- 
harmonies exist  in  modern  marriage,  and  these 
Strindberg  set  himself  the  task  of  analysing.  It 
is  a  shallow  view  that  sees  in  him  the  mere 
misogynist.  It  is  possible  to  have  revered,  be- 
yond all  human  types,  the  wise  mother,  the  kind 
wife,  the  ancient  priestess  of  the  human  hearth, 
and  yet  to  have  written  Comrades  and  The  Link. 
For  that  type  has  presented  itself  immemorially 
to  the  imagination  and  experience  of  men.  The 
predatory  suffragette  is  a  thing  of  yesterday  and 
may  soon  be  "with  yesterday's  seven  thousand 
years."  Yet  for  our  own  time  these  plays  of 
Strindberg's  are  of  the  last  importance.  Amid 
much  loose  thinking  and  looser  talking  he  set 
down  the  bare,  frank  truth.  It  may  be  impos- 
sible to  refound  that  home  in  which  man,  from 
of  old,  has  found  his  joy  and  peace;  it  may  be 
necessary  to  shatter  and  remould  anew  the  whole 
fabric  of  society  and  totally  to  change  the  rela- 
tions of  the  sexes.  That,  however,  is  another 


32  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

matter.  It  is  a  valorous  deed  to  have  shown  that 
marriage  and  feminism — in  its  immediate  and 
acrid  sense — are  incompatible. 

This  group  of  five  plays  has  a  further  impor- 
tance in  the  history  of  the  modem  drama.  For 
the  magnificent  economy  of  his  structure  Strind- 
berg  had  but  the  single  example  of  Ghosts 
(1881)  when  he  wrote  The  Father  (1887).  Ear- 
lier than  any  other  playwright  he  grasped  with 
full  consciousness  all  the  principles  of  modern 
dramaturgy — exclusion  of  intrigue,  seamless  con- 
tinuity of  structure,  a  dialogue  that  produces  the 
illusion  of  real  speech.  He  rightly  asserts  in  the 
preface  to  Miss^ Julia  (1888)  that,  as  a  natural- 
ist, he  has  wholly  abandoned  the  creation  of 
labelled  types  and  has  shown  the  human  soul  in 
its  boundless  and  troubled  complexity  and  that 
he  has  avoided  the  symmetrical  give  and  take  of 
French  dialogue  "in  order  to  let  the  brains  of 
men  work  unhindered."  It  is  equally  noteworthy 
that  all  these  dramas  observe  the  unities  of  both 
time  and  place.  These  technical  qualities,  united 
to  Strindberg's  power  of  psychological  analysis, 
tend  to  make  the  five  pieces  discussed  his  most 
solid  contribution  to  dramatic  literature.  In 
poetry,  in  imagination,  in  variety  and  charm  of 
matter,  he  is  surpassed  by  many  playwrights. 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  33 

The  sombre  concentration  with  which  he  exposed 
the  disharmonies  which  had  hurt  him  most  acutely 
— that  stands  alone. 

Ill 

The  protest  in  favour  of  a  new  dramatic  spirit 
and  method  was  most  persistent  and  most  direct 
in  France.  For  it  was  here  that  there  had  arisen, 
largely  through  the  work  of  the  indefatigable 
Eugene  Scribe  (1791-1861)  a  mere  mechanic  art 
of  the  theatre  wholly  divorced  from  reality  either 
in  life  or  thought.  This  drama,  which  amused 
all  Europe,  did  not  even  in  its  heyday  pass  with- 
out sharp  and  just  criticism.  But  the  criticism 
was  faintly  voiced  and  proceeded  only  from  a 
few  of  the  finer  spirits  of  the  time.  Thus,  in  his 
Soiree  perdue,  Alfred  de  Musset,  as  early  as 
1840,  wrote  lines  which  may  be  freely  rendered 
as  follows: 

"Alone  one  night  at  the  Frangais  I  sate ; 
The  author's  hit  was  less  than  moderate. 
'Twas  only  Moliere  who,  'tis  known,  at  best — 
That  blunderer  who  one  day  wrote  Alceste — 
Had  not  the  art  of  tickling  mind  and  hide 
By  serving  a  denouement  cut  and  dried. 
Thank  heaven,  our  playwrights  take  another  road, 
And  we  prefer  some  drama  a  la  mode. 


34  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

Where  the  intrigue  inextricably  bound 
Swings,  like  a  toy,  the  same  mechanic  round." 

Into  this  comedy  of  mere  intrigue  two  men, 
Emile  Augier  (1820-1889)  and  Alexandre 
Dumas,  fils  (1824-1895),  sought  to  inject  the  ob- 
servation of  manners  and  the  power  of  moral  rea- 
soning. The  history  of  the  French  stage  from 
1850  to  1880  is  the  history  of  their  works.  Un- 
der the  influence,  however,  of  the  naturalistic 
movement  in  the  novel,  which  was  rendered  il- 
lustrious soon  after  the  middle  of  the  century  by 
the  work  of  Gustave  Flaubert,  it  was  felt  with  a 
growing  keenness  that  the  theatre  of  Augier  and 
Dumas  was  really  incapable  of  either  rendering 
or  interpreting  life.  Both  playwrights  adhered 
in  the  structure  of  their  pieces  to  the  mechanic 
formula  of  Scribe,  and  Dumas  invalidated  his  art 
by  the  eagerness  of  his  polemics.  In  this  condi- 
tion of  the  theatre  it  was  but  natural  that  the 
novelists  of  the  new  school  should  have  made  the 
effort  to  transfer  to  it  their  methods  and  their 
ideals. 

Those  restless  and  intelligent  souls,  the  Gon- 
court  brothers,  were  first  in  the  field.  In  their 
journal — that  half-heroic,  half -pathological  rec- 
ord of  the  literary  life — they  have  set  down  the 
high  hopes,  the  heartburnings  and  the  bitter  dis- 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  35 

illusion  that  attended  the  difficult  production  and 
noisy  failure  of  their  Henriette  Marechal  in  1865. 
They  were  thoroughly  aware  of  the  degraded  con- 
dition of  the  French  drama  in  which,  as  Edmond 
de  Goncourt  explained,  "I  do  not  know  a  single 
denouement  which  is  not  brought  about  by  the  sud- 
den overhearing  of  a  conversation  behind  a  cur- 
tain, or  by  the  interception  of  a  letter,  or  by  some 
forced  trick  of  that  kind."  Yet  Henriette 
Marechal  itself  closes  with  a  pistol  shot  that  kills 
the  wrong  person,  and  begins  with  exposition  by 
a  series  of  monologues.  Nor  did  Augier  use 
grosser  coincidences  than  that  by  which  Paul  de 
Breville,  wounded  in  a  quixotic  duel  for  an  un- 
known lady,  is  carried  into  that  very  lady's  house 
to  await  his  recovery.  "But  there  is  truth  in  our 
play,"  Edmond  plead  years  later,  "far  more  truth 
than  people  believe."  He  was  not  wholly 
wrong.  The  fable  is  ill-managed,  the  technique 
cumbersome.  But  Henriette  is  a  delicate  and 
charming  figure  whose  nature  has  been  well 
grasped  and  is  well  presented.  And  throughout 
the  play  one  has  a  sense  of  brave  effort  to  escape 
from  the  external  and  mechanical  into  a  finer  re- 
gion of  dramatic  art. 

A  far  robuster  figure  entered  the  fray  for  a 
naturalistic  drama  in  the  person  of  Emile  Zola 


36  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

(1840-1903).  Between  1873  and  1878  he  .pro- 
duced three  plays.  But  they  were  hissed  from 
the  stage,  and  his  longest  run  was  one  of  seven- 
teen nights.  Yet  theoretically  and  despite  the 
stupefying  narrowness  of  his  positivism,  Zola  had 
the  root  of  the  matter  in  him.  It  must  have  been 
a  strange  reflection  for  him  that  his  ideals  for 
the  theatre  were  ultimately  realised  in  Germany 
and  not  in  France  at  all.  He  began  quite  rightly 
by  inveighing  against  the  reigning  "comedy  of 
intrigue"  which  he  declared  to  be  "a  mere  game 
of  patience,  a  bauble  ...  in  which  all  solid  ele- 
ments are  considered  boredom,"  and  equally 
against  the  play  with  a  purpose  (piece  a  these). 
"Never,"  he  Lnely  and  truly  wrote,  "have  the 
great  masters  preached  or  desired  to  prove  any- 
thing. They  have  lived  and  that  has  sufficed  to 
make  immortal  lessons  of  their  works."  His  posi- 
tive statements  are  even  more  important  for  the 
development  of  the  modern  drama.  "What  is 
needed  to-day  is  a  large  and  simple  delineation  of 
men  and  things,  a  drama  which  Moliere  might 
have  written."  And  of  his  own  plays  he  said: 
"The  action  resides  not  in  some  plot  but  in  the 
inner  conflicts  of  the  characters;  the  logic  used 
is  not  one  of  facts  but  of  sensations  and  senti- 
ments." His  people,  he  finally  declared,  "do  not 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  37 

play  but  live  before  the  public."  This  was  a  re- 
markably early  statement  (1878)  of  the  meth- 
ods of  the  best  modern  dramaturgy. 

Of  the  three  actual  plays  of  Zola,  two  may  be 
dismissed  at  once.  Les  Heritiers  Rabourdin 
(1874)  ig  a  tiresome  variation  on  a  stock  comedy 
theme;  Le  Bouton  de  Rose  (1878),  an  unconvin- 
cing working  over  of  a  phantastic  story  from  Bal- 
zac's Contes  Drolatiques.  There  remains  Ther- 
ese  Raquin  (1873)  which  may  fairly  be  called 
the  first  tragedy  of  the  naturalistic  theatre. 

The  story  is  of  a  crudely  brutal  tinge.  Therese 
and  Laurent  on  a  boating  expedition  drown  the 
former's  husband.  But  they  have  not,  in  the  end, 
the  strength  and  the  baseness  to  profit  by  their 
crime.  On  the  very  night  of  their  marriage, 
goaded  and  maddened  by  remorse  and  supersti- 
tious fear,  they  take  prussic  acid  and  die.  There 
is,  however,  no  coil  'of  intrigue.  The  play  con- 
sists in  the  working  out  through  character  of  the 
necessary  consequences  of  a  given  action.  And 
that  action  in  itself  is  not  fortuitous  but  had  re- 
sulted, in  its  turn,  from  the  contact  of  character 
with  character.  In  a  word,  Zola  succeeded  meas- 
urably in  using  a  logic  "not  of  facts  but  of  sensa- 
tions and  sentiments."  The  play  contains  in  ad- 
dition that  close-packed  portrayal  of  milieu  and 


38  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

character  which  is  characteristic  of  the  best  dra- 
matic work  of  its  kind.  As  in  his  novels,  to  be 
sure,  Zola  could  not  wholly  escape  the  lurid.  The 
paralysis  of  Mme.  Raquin,  Sr.,  her  late  discovery 
of  her  daughter-in-law's  guilt,  the  dreadful  re- 
venge of  the  silenced  woman — these  are  the  fruits 
of  Zola's  romantic  appetite  for  the  monstrous  and 
merely  horrible.  Yet  Therese  Raquin,  with  its 
stringent  evolution,  its  unity  of  place  and  its 
strong  verisimilitude  bears  witness  to  the  power 
and  intelligence,  if  not  to  the  fineness  and  genius 
of  its  author's  mind. 

The  lure  of  the  theatre  was  also  felt  by  Al- 
phonse  Daudet  (1840-1897)  whose  best-known 
play,  UArlesienne,  was  produced  in  1872.  But 
even  as  a  novelist,  and  despite  the  immense  docu- 
mentation of  which  he  was  so  proud,1  Daudet 
hardly  belonged  to  the  inner  circle  of  naturalism. 
The  austere  impersonality  of  the  school  was  never 
truly  his.  The  scene  of  UArlesienhe  is  laid  in 
his  beloved  South;  it  suffers  from  an  overdose  of 
his  characteristic  sweetness,  and  cannot  be  said  to 
have  hastened  or  even  foreshadowed  the  approach 
of  the  modern  drama.  An  interesting  technical 
point  in  the  play  is  that  the  woman  of  Aries,  whose 

i  Vide  his  Trente  ans  de  Paris. 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  39 

character  is  the  exciting  force  of  the  action,  never 
appears  at  all. 

The  youngest  of  the  great  naturalistic  masters 
in  prose  fiction  also  tried  his  fortune  in  the  thea- 
tre. But  the  two  plays  of  Guy  de  Maupassant 
(1850-1893)  appeared  in  the  full  tide  of  the 
modern  movement.  He  is  not  at  his  best  in  them. 
Yet  both  Musotte  ( 1891 )  and  La  Paix  du  Menage 
(1893)  show  traces  of  his  incomparable  power. 

Thus  it  is  seen  that  the  naturalistic  novelists 
failed  to  conquer  the  stage  for  the  methods  of 
their  school.  Their  work,  however,  had  its  in- 
fluence; later  playwrights  returned  to  it  for  guid- 
ance; it  gradually  accustomed  at  least  a  small 
section  of  the  public  to  the  ideals  of  the  new  art, 
and  prepared  the  way  for  Henri  Becque  and  for 
the  men  and  works  of  the  modern  French  theatre. 

IV 

I  have  already  named  the  dramatist  who  defi- 
nitely founded  the  modern  theatre  in  France. 
The  talent  of  Henri  Becque  (1837-1891)  was 
slow  to  mature  and  even  in  its  maturity  hard, 
dry,  and  far  from  copious.  His  work  is  not  en- 
gaging. His  mind  had  neither  a  touch  of  inge- 
nuity (the  strong  point  of  the  older  play- 


40  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

wrights),  nor  of  that  almost  silent  poetry  wrung 
from  life  itself  which  distinguishes  the  later  nat- 
uralists. His  chief  gift  is  that  of  a  Molierian 
irony — the  irony  that  results  from  the  uncon- 
scious self-revelation  of  base  or  corrupt  charac- 
ters. "You  have  been  surrounded  by  rascals,  my 
dear,  ever  since  your  father's  death,"  Teissier,  the 
most  brutal  of  these  rascals,  says  to  Marie  at  the 
end  of  Les  Corbeaux  (1882).  "You  wouldn't 
want  a  mistress  who  is  not  religious!  That 
would  be  dreadful!"  Clotilde  (La  Parisienne, 
1885)  exclaims  to  her  lover.  The  ironic  revela- 
tion of  a  confusion  of  all  moral  values  could 
scarcely  be  more  succinct  and  telling.  Yet 
Becque  makes  no  display  of  these  passages;  he 
does  not  emphasise  them  or  set  them  off  by  the 
modelling  of  his  dialogue.  Their  power  and 
meaning  are  gradually  revealed. 

His  first  play  L'Enfant  prodigue  (1868)  is  a 
lively  comedy  of  no  great  interest  or  originality. 
But  very  doggedly  during  these  years  Becque  was 
feeling  his  way,  quite  careless  of  the  contempo- 
rary fashions  of  the  stage.  He  had  not  yet  found 
that  way  in  Michel  Pauper  (1870).  The  plot 
is  violent  and  crude ;  the  dialogue  stilted  and  sen- 
timental; and  Paris  laughed  the  play  to  scorn. 
The  first  period  of  his  activity  may  be  said  to 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  41 

close  with  a  one-act  play  La  Navette  (1878). 
Here,  however,  amid  a  conventional  plot  con- 
veyed through  a  conventional  technique  there  are 
hints  of  the  ironic  manner  of  his  best  passages. 

In  1880  Becque  produced  a  robust  and  keen- 
witted little  comedy  in  one  act:  Les  Honnetes 
Femmes.  He  had  evidently  now  settled  down 
to  the  close  and  sober  study  of  character. 
Through  Mme.  Chevalier  he  seeks  to  reveal 
woman's  genuine  attitude  to  motherhood  and 
marriage.  There  are  almost  Shavian  hints  in  her 
self -revelation.  But  these  are  quite  unconscious 
on  Becque' s  part.  He  had  gained  the  imperson- 
ality of  the  naturalistic  drama  and,  again,  two 
years  later,  gave  the  public  his  masterpiece,  Les 
Corbeaux. 

The  play  is  a  study  in  character  and  in  social 
conditions.  It  is  wholly  free  from  polemic  in- 
tention of  any  kind.  A  piece  of  human  life  un- 
folds itself.  The  technique  has  not  yet  the  plain 
and  bare  nobility  attained  by  Hauptmann  or 
Hirschfeld  or  Galsworthy  at  their  best.  But 
there  is  neither  trickery  nor  mechanical  interfer- 
ence. The  illusion  of  the  rhythm  of  life  is  main- 
tained throughout.  The  second  act  trails  off  into 
a  natural,  desperate,  human  silence  as  one  dun- 
ning letter  after  another  is  read. 


42  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

We  are  introduced  to  the  family  of  a  moder- 
ately wealthy  bourgeois.  M.  Vigneron  has  a 
wife  and  three  daughters,  Judith,  Marie  and 
Blanche.  The  latter  is  betrothed  to  a  young 
man  of  small  means  but  of  good  family.  Vig- 
neron is  entirely  self-made.  He  has  suffered  pri- 
vations in  his  youth  and  his  plenteous  table  is  now 
his  chief  pleasure.  He  overeats  and  overworks. 
The  first  act  ends  with  his  death  from  an  apo- 
plectic stroke. 

There  follow  the  consequences.  The  women 
are  quite  unskilled  and  ignbrant  of  affairs. 
Hence  the  vultures  gather — chief  of  them 
Teissier,  the  late  Vigneron's  partner,  but  also 
architects,  furnishers,  tradesmen  of  all  sorts  and 
the  family  solicitor.  One  kind  of  pressure  after 
another  is  applied.  Teissier  and  the  solicitor 
talk  of  saving  what  little  is  left  of  the  estate. 
Blanche's  engagement  is  broken.  Marie,  the  most 
clear-seeing  of  the  three  girls,  is  not  unaware  of 
the  chicanery  that  surrounds  them.  But  their  ne- 
cessities are  immediate.  The  women  are  timid, 
doubtful  of  their  own  suspicions,  and  finally  agree 
to  the  solicitor's  plans.  Judith,  who  is  a  musi- 
cian, entertains  the  hope  that  she  may  be  able  to 
assume  the  burden  of  the  family.  But  her  talent 
is  not  sufficient  for  anything  except  to  introduce 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  43 

her  to  a  life  of  shame.  What  is  left?  Marie 
consents,  quite  bravely  and  humanly,  to  marry 
the  sordid  old  Teissier  who  immediately  proceeds 
to  deal  with  the  other  vultures. 

The  dialogue  is  not  polished  nor  is  it  particu- 
larly racy.  The  structure  is,  at  times,  almost 
crude.  Yet  the  simple  facts  of  life  and  their 
meaning  are  stamped  upon  the  memory  by 
Becque's  dramatic  irony.  The  play,  with  all  its 
imperfections,  is  a  masterpiece,  foreshadowing 
the  long  line  of  works  that  forms  the  chief  dis- 
tinction of  the  modern  drama. 

La  Parisienne  is  more  closely-knit  structurally 
and  far  better  written  than  Les  Corbeaux.  The 
unity  of  place  is  maintained  and  the  movement 
is  both  swift  and  nimble.  Here  the  dramatist's 
whole  art  is  concentrated  upon  the  ironic  self- 
revelation  of  a  single  character.  Clotilde  is  the 
woman  who  is  respectably  adulterous,  sentimen- 
tally vicious.  She  amuses  herself  with  her  lovers 
and  is  concerned  to  better  her  husband's  position. 
She  is  utterly  unaware  of  her  own  corruption  and 
makes  speech  after  speech  that  is  memorable  for 
its  incisive  moral  irony. 

About  the  whole  career  of  Becque  there  is 
something  poverty-stricken  and  frustrated.  Ad- 
mirable as  are  his  best  plays,  they  seem  wrung 


44  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

from  a  soul  without  passion  or  spiritual  fervour. 
But  their  importance  in  the  history  of  the  drama 
is  quite  secure. 


By  1885  the  "well-made"  play  of  the  French 
type  was  definitely  discredited  by  all  the  acutest 
and  freshest  critical  minds  in  Europe.  In  Ger- 
many and  France  the  eager  young  leaders  of  the 
modern  drama  were  gradually  finding  their  way 
toward  productivity.  But  the  official  and  com- 
mercial theatres  were  closed  to  them.  The  great 
public  knew  little  or  nothing  of  the  modem 
movement  except  as,  faintly  and  distortedly 
enough,  it  was  aware  of  the  scandal  and  terror 
that  had  followed  in  the  wake  of  A  Doll's  House 
and  Ghosts.  Nor  was  this  all.  The  art  of  act- 
ing,  developed  for  many  years  in  harmony  with 
external  effectiveness  and  artificial  eloquence,  was 
in  no  condition  to  interpret  the  simple  realities 
of  the  new  drama.  Censorships  and  police  regu- 
jlations,  moreover,  made  any  public  performance 
of  modern  plays  difficult  and  dangerous. 

In  this  state  of  affairs  M.  Andre  Antoine,  a 
Parisian  actor  and  manager,  completely  in  sym- 
pathy with  the  naturalistic  drama,  established  the 
epoch-making  Theatre  Libre  in  1887.  It  was 


THE  FOUNDATIONS  45 

not,  in  the  ordinary  sense,  a  theatre  at  all.  Pri- 
vate performances  were  given  for  subscribers 
only,  and  thus  the  problems  of  both  censorship 
and  of  commercial  profit  were  eliminated  at  once. 
Antoine  himself  acted  and  trained  his  associates 
in  the  quiet  reproduction  of  the  tones  and  ges- 
tures of  life.  The  names  of  many  of  the  play- 
wrights whom  Antoine  introduced  to  the  world 
have  already  fallen  into  a  semi-obscurity — Jean 
Jullien,  George  Ancey,  Camille  Fabre.  But  he 
opened  the  careers  of  Brieux  and  Curel;  he  gave 
Paris  Ghosts,  Tolstoi's  The  Might  of  Darkness 
and,  in  later  years,  The  Weavers  of  Gerhart 
Hauptmann.  Furthermore,  in  the  very  year  of 
its  organisation,  the  company  of  M.  Antoine 
played  in  Berlin  and  vitally  helped  the  birth  of 
the  new  drama  in  Germany. 

Two  years  later,  in  1889,  the  Free  Stage  Soci- 
ety (Verein  Freie  Buhne)  was  established  in  Ber- 
lin. The  brilliant  journalist,  Maximilian  Har- 
den, the  critics,  Theodor  Wolff  and  Paul  Schlen- 
ther,  the  skilful  stage-manager  and  defender  of 
naturalism,  Otto  Brahm,  all  had  their  share  in 
the  founding  of  the  society  which  shaped  so  re- 
markably the  fortunes  of  the  modern  drama. 
The  plan  of  the  Freie  Biihne  was  in  all  respects 
identical  with  that  of  Antoine.  And  like  the 


46  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

Theatre  Libre,  it  began  with  Ibsen,  with  Tolstoi, 
with  Zola  and  Goncourt,  and  had  the  memorable 
fortune  of  opening  the  theatre  to  Hauptmann. 

Both  stages  had  many  successors  and  imita- 
tors. The  modern  drama  was  thus  first  presented 
to  small  and  picked  audiences  from  whom  it 
gradually  passed  to  a  larger  public.  As  Brahm 
admirably  put  it:  "The  success  of  the  free  stage 
societies  meant  their  extinction."  Both  in  France 
and  in  Germany  the  masters  of  the  modern 
drama,  one  after  another,  conquered  the  official 
and  commercial  theatres.  In  England,  where  the 
Independent  Theatre  was  opened  with  Ibsen  and 
with  Shaw  in  1891,  the  function  of  a  free  stage 
cannot  yet,  in  Brahm's  sense,  be  said  to  have  been 
completely  exercised.  In  America  its  use  is  still 
to  come.  The  place  of  these  theatres  in  the  his- 
tory of  the  modern  stage,  however,  plainly  dis- 
poses of  the  critical  delusion,  so  frequently  nursed 
in  England  and  America,  that  a  dramatic  move- 
ment lacks  greatness  and  force  because  it  does 
not  at  once  appeal  to  the  populace.  The  origins 
of  the  modern  drama  on  the  Continent  illustrate 
the  fortunes  of  an  art  that,  through  the  media- 
tion of  liberal  and  intelligent  audiences,  was  grad- 
ually communicated  to  the  slow  moving  masses 
of  men. 


CHAPTER  TWO 
THE  REALISTIC  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE 

I 

A  MODERATELY  acute  observer,  frequenting  the 
theatres  of  Paris  in  the  years  that  followed  the 
founding  of  the  Theatre  Libre,  would  have  ex- 
perienced little  difficulty  in  foretelling  the  exact 
character  of  the  whole  modern  movement  on  the 
French  stage.  The  attitude  of  such  an  observer 
to  the  plays  he  saw  would  have  varied,  of  course, 
with  his  age  and  tastes  and  nationality.  Con- 
cerning two  facts,  however,  he  could  not  long 
have  remained  in  doubt:  The  structural  charac- 
ter of  the  French  drama  had  undergone  a  pro- 
found change;  the  old  patterns  had  been  defi- 
nitely remoulded.  But  the  change  was  not,  upon 
the  whole,  in  the  direction  of  that  transference 
of  naturalistic  aims  and  methods  to  the  art  of 
the  theatre  for  which  Henri  Becque  had  so  long 
and  so  valiantly  laboured. 

It  is  necessary  to  assume  for  my  observer,  no 
47 


48  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

doubt,  a  taste  for  new  talents  and  first  nights. 
Given  that  taste  he  would  have  seen  in  1890 
Brieux's  Menages  d*  Artistes  at  the  Theatre  Libre 
and  Jules  Lemaitre's  Le  Depute  Leveau  at  the 
Vaudeville;  in  1891  he  would  have  returned  from 
the  Odeon  knowing  that  he  had  witnessed  a  mas- 
terpiece of  a  new  kind  in  Amour euse  by  Georges 
de  Porto-Riche.  But  1892  would  have  been  his 
great  year.  For  in  that  year  he  would  have  seen 
Brieux,  still  at  the  Theatre  Libre,  display  his 
most  solid  and  enduring  gifts  in  the  first  two  acts 
of  Blanchette;  he  would  have  seen  arise  on  the 
boards -of  that  same  playhouse  the  sombre  and 
mysterious  glow  of  Frangois  de  CurePs  genius. 
Nor  is  this  all.  At  the  Vaudeville,  within  the 
space  of  a  few  months,  he  might  have  been  pres- 
ent at  Henri  Lavedan's  first  decisive  success  with 
Le  Prince  d'Aurec,  and  at  Paul  Hervieu's  first 
display  of  moral  and  intellectual  gymnastics  in 
Les  Paroles  restent. 

Now  if  my  hypothetical  play-goer  had  been, 
as  is  not  unlikely,  over  forty,  fond  of  the  bril- 
liant artifice  traditional  on  the  French  stage,  and 
a  more  or  less  devout  reader  of  the  critiques  of 
Francisque  Sarcey,  the  new  methods  and  experi- 
ments he  saw  would  have  touched  him  with  a 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  49 

sense  of  pain  and  disillusion.  The  drama  was, ; 
quite  obviously,  ceasing  to  be  an  art  governed 
only  by  its  own  conventions,  and  absorbing  only 
so  much  of  the  living  reality  as  could  be  trans- 
muted into  theatrical  effectiveness.  Intrigue,  in 
the  older  sense,  had  been  very  nearly  eliminated 
from  the  new  plays;  there  was  no  action  merely 
for  its  own  sake.  If  the  fable  was  based  upon 
some  decisive  action,  that  action  had  usually 
taken  place  long  before  the  unfolding  of  its  moral 
and  spiritual  consequences  upon  the  stage.  More 
often?  however,  the  play_arose^f rom  a  character 

or   a   condition,    rather   than   from~~ariy~ action. 

Equally  disconcerting  must  have  been  the  fact 
that  some  of  these  plays  showed  no  progression, 
but  left  their  characters  very  much  where  they 
found  them.  In  other  words,  my  observer  would 
have  discovered,  to  his  delight  or  dismay,  all  the 
earmarks  of  the  modern  drama  in  the  early  work 
of  the  men  who  were  to  dominate  the  French  stage 
of  the  succeeding  quarter  of  a  century. 

The  technique  of  the  new  drama  was,  neces- 
sarily, not  only  simplified  but  far  more  flexible. 
The  relentless  pattern  of  Scribe  and  his  successors 
was  broken:  Exposition,  progression,  resolution, 
illustrative  or  antithetical  action — both  within  the 


50  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

act  and  within  the  frame  of  the  whole  play,  all 
might  be  lacking.1  The  plays,  by  all  the  tradi- 
tional rules  of  the  game,  should  have  been  inef- 
fectual upon  the  stage.  Yet  they  were  not. 
Dialogue  alone,  though  rarely  epigrammatic  or 
neatly  dovetailed,  had  undergone  no  fundamental 
change.  The  dialogue  of  the  French  drama  is 
still  literary  in  the  narrower  sense.  The  Parisian 
play-goer  of  the  early  nineties,  unlike  his  Ger- 
man contemporary,  was  not  shocked  by  hearing 
the  unmistakable  accents  of  his  own  daily  speech 
and  voice  float  to  him  across  the  footlights.  Nor, 
reduced  to  the  printed  page,  did  these  new  plays 
show  that  elaborate  exactitude  in  the  description 
of  scene,  character,  gesture  and  mood  which  the 
great  Scandinavian  dramatists  had  introduced 
and  the  German  naturalists  had  just  perfected. 
In  other  words,  the  modern  drama  in  France, 
subtle,  flexible  and  trenchant  in  theme  and  tech- 
nique as  it  is,  has  not  been,  as  I  began  by  pointing 
out,  steadily  naturalistic  at  any  time.  Brieux 
alone  achieves,  rarely  in  more  than  a  single  act, 
passages  of  broad  and  robust  objectivity.  But 
always  his  over-eager  intellect  breaks  in;  and 
either  shatters  or  slowly  analyses  away  the  world 

i  For  a  discriminating  but  by  no  means  hostile  description 
of  the  traditional  technique  cf.  Augustin  Filon:  De  Dumas 
a  Rostand,  pp.  14-17. 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  51 

he  has  created.  Now  \  naturalism  is  the  product 
of  a  brooding  and  contemplative  mindJ  It  is 
watchful  of  the  vision  of  life,  but  very  patient; 
not  over-zealous  to  change  this  essentially  change- 
less world,  nor  desirous  of  reducing  its  vast  multi- 
formities to  the  trim  confines  of  a  moral  or  an 
inference.  The  modern  drama  of  France,  on  the 
contrary,  is  restlessly  intelligent  and  even  argu- 
mentative. It  is,  like  the  whole  of  French  litera- 
ture, vividly  social,  immensely  preoccupied  with 
moral  ideas  and  careless  of  facts  except  as  they 
illustrate  the  ideas  which  the  playwright  has  at 
heart.  Thus  it  comes  about  that  the  most  illus- 
trious master  of  the  contemporary  stage  in 
France,  Paul  Hervieu,  as  well  as  his  lesser  col- 
league, Eugene  Brieux,  is  a  preacher  of  doctrine 
rather  than  a  creator  of  character. 

The  activity  of  the  French  drama  during  the 
past  twenty  years  has  been  quite  literally  enor- 
mous. Hence  I  must  exclude  from  my  interpre- 
tative survey  those  figures  which  do  not  add  to 
an  understanding  of  the  character — so  diverse  and 
yet  so  homogeneous — of  the  modern  drama.  I 
omit,  therefore,  with  little  hesitation,  the  solidly 
observed  work  of  Georges  Courtelines,  the  ami- 
able comedies  of  Alfred  Capus,  the  high-pitched 
emotional  plays  of  Henri  Bernstein.  Nor,  on  the 


52  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

other  hand,  is  it  advisable  to  touch  upon  the  in- 
creasing throng  of  talents  that  yet  lack  outline 
and  perspective.  We  shall  learn  all  that  is  nec- 
essary from  the  work  of  seven  playwrights  which 
by  its  scope,  significance  and  level  of  accomplish- 
ment holds  and  illustrates  the  national  stage. 
These  playwrights  are  Georges  de  Porto-Riche, 
Francois  de  Curel,  Henri  Lavedan,  Eugene 
Brieux,  Paul  Hervieu,  Jules  Lemaitre  and  Mau- 
rice Donnay. 

II 

M.  Georges  de  Porto-Riche  (b.  1849)  has 
called  his  collected  plays  Theatre  d*  Amour.  The 
title  is  just.  For  M.  de  Porto-Riche  is  quite  ex- 
clusively the  psychologist  of  love.  Alone  of  the 
modern  French  dramatists  he  began  his  career  by 
writing  and  publishing  verses.  Yet  it  would  be 
vain  to  look  in  his  plays  for  lyric  ardour  or  ro- 
mantic passion.  Beauty  he  sees  in  love,  but  a 
beauty  that  is  touched  with  mournfulness.  His 
insight  into  the  maladies  of  love,  into  the  diffi- 
culties of  the  human  heart,  is  so  complete,  that 
it  has  silenced  in  him  all  protest  or  precept.  He 
analyses  with  a  quiet  but  unerring  kindliness  that 
nervous,  passionate,  sad  battle  which  the  mod- 
ern mind  calls  love — love,  now  no  longer  the 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  53 

blending  of  a  sacred  weakness  into  a  larger  and 
sustaining  life,  but  the  bitter  strife  between  man 
and  woman,  fatally  hostile  to  each  other  in  their 
new  separateness  and  incapable  of  any  harmoni- 
ous union  of  some  other,  yet  undiscovered  kind. 
Of  these  conflicts  the  characters  of  Porto-Riche 
have  no  objective  consciousness.  They  experi- 
ence them;  they  do  not  reflect  upon  them  or  an- 
alyse them.  They  know  that  to  endure  love  at 
all  takes  whatever  one  has  of  delicacy,  of  self- 
abnegation,  of  the  power  to  suffer.  Yet  they 
know,  too,  that  love  is  the  eternally  beautiful 
and  desirable.  Hence  they  speak  with  voices 
slightly  subdued,  and  their  creator  has  lent  them 
a  subtle  and  well-cadenced  eloquence,  passionate 
yet  temperate,  elegant  yet  sincere. 

Porto-Riche  made  his  first  appearance  as  a  play- 
wright toward  the  end  of  1888  at  the  Theatre 
Libre  with  a  one-act  comedy,  La  Chance  de  Fran- 
foise.  The  piece  is  structurally  imperfect.  The 
awkward  convention  of  the  impossible  "aside"  is 
used  and  the  characters  are  pulled  about  mechan- 
ically. But  already  the  author  understands  the 
root  of  the  matter.  Franchise  is  the  modern  mid- 
dle-class woman,  freed  from  nearly  all  physical 
burdens  and  material  tasks,  and  making  of  love 
her  calling  and  her  occupation.  Thence  arise  the 


54  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

enormous  emotional  demands  which  she  makes 
upon  her  husband.  The  latter,  however,  is  an 
artist  and  philanderer,  and  for  this  reason  Porto- 
Riche's  first  statement  of  his  favourite  "case" 
lacks  justness  and  representative  power.  Uncom- 
mon, too,  are  the  perfect  humility  and  sweetness 
of  Franchise  which  make  her  condemn  even  her 
silent  suffering  as  in  the  nature  of  a  reproach. 
For  such  a  temperament  there  is  no  hope  except 
— as  the  author  clearly  saw — in  the  sadly  joyous 
cry  of  Frangoise  to  her  husband  with  which  the 
play  ends:  "She  has  betrayed  you,  Lovelace; 
you  are  growing  old !" 

The  fine  analytic  and  dramatic  power  so  clearly 
present  in  La  Chance  de  Frangoise  came  to  ad- 
mirable maturity  three  years  later  in  the  three- 
act  play,  Amour euse.  It  is  by  virtue  primarily 
of  this  play  that  Porto-Riche's  name  belongs  defi- 
nitely to  the  history  of  the  French  theatre.  It 
has  never,  from  its  first  appearance  to  the  present 
year,  been  long  absent  from  the  Parisian  stage. 
For  years  it  formed  a  solid  addition  to  the  reper- 
tory of  Mme.  Rejane,  and  in  1908  it  enjoyed  a 
new  triumph  at  the  Comedie-Frangaise. 

Amour  euse  is  an  extraordinarily  complete  and 
searching  presentation  of  the  problem  of  modern 
love.  Dr.  Etienne  Feriaud  is  a  distinguished 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  55 

physician  and  investigator  with  a  noble  and  virile 
faith  in  his  mission  and  in  his  type.  "It  is  they 
whom  you  jeer  at,"  he  says  to  his  frivolous  friend 
Pascal,  "it  is  the  scientists,  the  artists  and  the 
poets  who  have  bettered  this  imperfect  world  and 
made  it  more  endurable.  .  .  .  Doubtless  they 
have  been  bad  husbands,  indifferent  friends,  re- 
bellious sons.  Does  it  matter?  Their  labours 
and  their  dreams  have  sown  happiness,  justice  and 
beauty  over  the  earth.  They  have  not  been  kind 
lovers,  these  egoists,  but  they  have  created  love 
for  those  who  came  after  them."  Dr.  Feriaud, 
always  admired  by  women,  has  had  his  adven- 
tures, though  the  chief  of  these  was  eminently 
staid  and  sensible.  At  forty  he  has  married,  for 
love,  to  be  sure,  but  quite  definitely  in  order  to 
pursue,  in  the  suave  peace  of  his  own  home,  his 
intellectual  aims.  In  making  these  reasonable 
plans  he  has  reckoned  without  the  psychology  of 
the  modern  woman.  Mme.  Germaine  Feriaud,  as 
she  tells  him  in  a  brilliant  passage,  has  not  been 
surfeited  with  passion  and  romance  before  mar- 
riage. In  marriage  she  must  find  her  passion  and 
her  romance.  Unendurable  as  her  exactions  are, 
she  esteems  them  nobler  and  braver  than  the  sen- 
sible comforts  of  middle-aged  matrimony.  The 
result  is  that  Feriaud  can  neither  work  nor  think. 


56  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

"I  have  lost  the  right  to  be  alone,"  he  cries  out, 
"she  rummages  in  my  brain  as  though  it  were  a 
chest  of  drawers."  He  writes  his  letters  in  a 
restaurant  to  avoid  Germaine's  nerve-racking  in- 
quisitiveness.  Her  feminine  adornments  are  on 
his  desk,  his  house  is  in  disorder,  dispute  follows 
reconciliation,  and  reconciliation,  dispute.  He 
has  accepted  an  invitation  to  represent  the  med- 
ical science  of  France  at  a  congress  in  Florence. 
By  her  troubling  and  indirect  appeals,  by  her  half- 
hidden  cajoleries,  Germaine  causes  him — appar- 
ently by  his  own  will — to  withdraw  at  the  elev- 
enth hour  and  stay  with  her.  No  sooner  has  he 
made  his  consent  to  stay  irrevocable  than  the  sub- 
tle rancour  that  is  necessarily  at  the  heart  of  such 
a  situation  breaks  forth.  He  tells  Germaine  the 
brutal  truth  at  last:  He  is  suffocating  spiritually 
and  physically  because  she  has  the  fatal  power  of 
putting  him  in  a  state  of  mind  which  is  contrary 
to  the  good  advice  she  gives  him  but  in  harmony 
with  those  intimate  desires  of  her  own  which  she 
dare  not  formulate.  He  must  have  freedom  and, 
since  she  threatens  him  with  an  act  of  irreparable 
rebellion  and  vengeance,  he  offers  her  with  cold 
sarcasm  to  Pascal.  Infuriated  by  his  cool  analy- 
sis of  their  emotional  situation,  she  takes  him  at 
his  word.  But  Germaine  has  her  own  notions  of 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  57 

honour.  She  confesses  her  sin  and  turns  to  leave 
the  house.  At  the  door  Etienne  stops  her.  Love 
is  deeper  than  wasted  days,  stronger  than  sin. 
"Why  have  restlessness  and  jealousy  forced  me 
to  re-open  this  door?"  he  laments.  "Alas,  we 
have  torn  at  each  other  like  bitter  foes,  irrepar- 
able words  have  been  spoken;  I  have  misunder- 
stood you,  you  have  betrayed  me  and  yet — I  am 
here.  It  seems  as  though  we  were  riveted  to- 
gether by  all  the  evil  we  have  done  each  other, 
by  all  the  shameful  words  we  have  spoken." 
"But  we  will  not  be  happy,"  she  cries.  And  all 
his  answer  is:  "What  does  it  matter?" 

I  do  not  think  that  M.  de  Porto-Riche  has 
equalled  Amoureuse  either  in  Le  Passe  (1897), 
despite  the  engaging  and  austere  charm  of  Dom- 
inique Brienne,  nor  in  the  tragic,  though  painful, 
Le  vieil  homme.  But  this  play  served,  in  1911, 
to  recall  to  the  entire  Parisian  press  the  fact  that 
France  possesses  one  dramatist  who  unites  with 
magnificent  economy  of  workmanship — fewness 
of  characters,  unity  of  place  and  almost  of  time 
— a  marvellous  knowledge  of  human  passion 
which  he  has  never  consented  to  dilute  by  rapid 
production  or  to  subordinate  to  a  merely  theatri- 
cal effectiveness. 


58  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

M.  Frangois  de  Curel  (b.  1854)  has  been  called 
a  psychologist.  I  am  willing  to  grant  him  that 
title,  although  his  psychology  has  a  way  of  be- 
ing, at  crucial  points,  altogether  incredible.  ,  In 
truth,  he  has  a  thousand  shortcomings  as  a  drama- 
tist and  yet  this  remarkable  virtue,  that,  in  a  coun- 
try of  social  talents  and  clear  accomplishments, 
he  is  so  rigorously,  so  mysteriously  himself.  It 
is  difficult  to  imagine  where  he  gained  his  intense 
and  sombre  vision  of  life.  One  fancies  him,  like 
his  own  Robert  de  Chantenelles,  the  son  of  an  an- 
cient family  fallen  upon  evil  days,  passing  his 
boyhood  and  youth  in  the  vast  greenery  of  some 
forgotten  and  solitary  park.  Beyond  the  park 
are  great  stretches  of  barren  country.  Within  it, 
here  and  there,  are  pools,  deep  and  old  and  green. 
A  few  white  swans  float  on  these  stagnant  waters 
and  fragments  of  old  statuary  crumble  amid  the 
shadows.  Here  the  youth,  dreaming  and  think- 
ing, built  himself  that  vision  of  human  life  and 
character  which  no  contact  with  the  world  has 
been  able  to  obliterate  or  change.  Here  he  must 
have  conceived  those  wide-eyed,  wandering  souls 
with  their  strange  nobility  and  strange  passions 
who  people  his  plays.  But  in  whatever  way  one 
seeks  to  disengage  the  peculiar  qualities  of  Curel's 
genius,  the  spirit  of  the  man  will  scarcely  admit 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  59 

a  very  intimate  approach.  It  remains  in  its  ar- 
dent, troubled  obscurity. 

He  mastered  at  the  very  outset  of  his  career 
the  methods  of  modern  dramaturgy  which  fell  in 
with  his  native  bent.  His  fables  are  of  souls  at 
conflict  with  themselves  or  with  each  other;  of 
visible  action  there  is  little.  Hence  a  few  char- 
acters and  a  limited  scene  suffice  him.  The 
drama  of  complicated  intrigue  and  rattling  cur- 
tains would  have  silenced  him  effectually.  Of 
dialogue  he  is  a  master  and  writes  it,  especially 
in  his  earlier  pieces,  with  a  haunting  vibrancy  of 
modulation  which  carries  one  through  speeches 
that  are  not  seldom  inordinately  long. 

M.  de  Curel's  plays  are  few.  And  yet  within 
their  narrow  range  he  seems  to  have  exhausted 
the  number  of  situations  with  which  he  can  deal 
powerfully.  His  latest  play  Le  Coup  d'Aile 
(1906)  is  a  tissue  of  sheer  psychological  violence, 
though  even  here  one  must  admit  that  wild  en- 
ergy— like  Charlotte  Bronte's — which,  for  mo- 
ments at  least,  silences  protest  and  disbelief.  But 
indeed  all  his  fables  are  difficult  and  strange:  A 
woman  is  abandoned  by  her  betrothed.  She  tries 
to  kill  the  young  wife  who  has  been  preferred  to 
her  and  retires  to  a  convent.  Eighteen  years 
pass.  The  man  dies  and  she  returns  to  the  world. 


60  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

She  discovers  that  the  wife  has  not  kept,  accord- 
ing to  the  promise  that  was  made,  the  shameful 
secret.  Thus  the  false  saint  renounced  life  in 
vain.  She  seeks  now  to  rob  her  rival  of  an  only 
daughter,  but  a  message  of  memory  and  affection 
from  the  dead  man — only  now  transmitted — 
softens  the  harsh  waywardness  of  her  soul  and 
she  returns  to  the  cloister  (L'Envers  d'une 
Saint e,  1892).  Another  woman,  discovering  her 
husband's  vulgar  liaison  leaves  her  home  and  her 
children  in  an  access  of  proud  fury  and  permits 
herself  to  be  thought  bad  or  mad  for  sixteen 
years.  Then  she  returns  having — if  one  will  be- 
lieve it — stifled  so  long  the  agony  of  her  mother- 
hood, and  rescues  her  daughters  from  the  corrupt- 
ing influences  of  her  husband's  life  (JJInvitee^ 
1893).  And  still  another  woman,  brave,  young, 
intelligent,  permits  herself,  loving  him  in  silence, 
to  be  married  as  a  matter  of  mere  form,  for  so- 
cial and  business  reasons,  to  an  eminent  politician 
who — as  it  is  denominated  in  the  bond — is  to  keep 
his  mistress.  The  young  wife  conquers  through 
her  wisdom  and  her  beauty  and  turns  her  shadow 
into  a  substance  (La  Figurante,  1896).  It  is 
needless  to  dwell  on  the  incredibly  self-torturing 
souls  in  L 'Amour  brode  (18513),  or  on  that  savage 
girl  who,  disillusioned  with  the  Western  civilisa- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  61 

tion  grafted  upon  her  unconquerable  primitive- 
ness,  becomes  a  queen  in  some  far  island  of  the 
Southern  seas  (La  Fille  sauvage,  1902).  Illog- 
ical and  monstrous  as  these  fables  are,  Curel's  in- 
tensity and  almost  tragic  conviction  wrests  from 
us  an  unwilling  and  temporary  assent. 

His  masterpiece  is  his  second  play:  Les  Fos- 
siles  (1892).  In  a  great,  shadowy  chateau  live 
the  Duke  de  Chantenelles,  his  wife  and  his  chil- 
dren, Robert  and  Claire.  Cut  off  by  their  lineage 
and  traditions  from  the  life  of  the  Republic,  they 
pass  a  morbid  and  silent  existence.  The  duke 
hunts  furiously  to  deaden  his  disappointment  and 
his  grief.  For  Robert  is  dying  of  consumption, 
and  with  him  the  house  of  Chantenelles  is  doomed. 
To  console  him  in  his  last  days  Robert  asks  for 
the  presence  of  Helene  Vautrin,  a  poor  school- 
fellow of  Claire's  who  once  passed  many  months 
as  a  guest  of  the  Chantenelles.  Robert  con- 
fesses that  she  was  his  mistress  and  has  borne  him 
a  child.  The  dying  man's  wish  is  granted,  de- 
spite Claire's  desperate  opposition,  and,  since  the 
child  is  a  boy,  a  marriage  is  determined  upon 
which  will  save  the  ancient  house  from  destruc- 
tion. But  Claire's  struggle  grows  more  embit- 
tered. She  has  sent  Helene  out  into  the  world 
on  account  of  the  girl's  shameful  relations  to  the 


62  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

duke.  The  latter,  however,  silences  his  daughter 
by  an  appeal  to  the  supreme  law  of  their  lives. 
She  consents  to  the  outrage  for  the  sake  of  the 
continuance  of  her  race.  Helene  comes.  She 
had  yielded  to  the  duke,  it  appears,  through  ig- 
norance and  confusion.  But  on  his  return  home 
her  real  love  was  given  to  Robert.  Now  Robert  is 
ordered  South  and  his  young  wife  pleads  with 
him  that,  after  his  death,  she  be  permitted  to  go 
with  her  child  and  live  her  own  life.  Claire 
hears  her  and,  in  terror  lest  all  their  monstrous 
consents  and  abnegations  have  been  in  vain,  cries 
out  to  Robert  the  dreadful  truth.  The  duke  con- 
firms it  with  the  cry :  "The  child  is — ours !"  De- 
liberately Robert  returns  to  the  frost-bound  cha- 
teau of  the  North  to  die  swiftly.  Beside  his  bier 
Claire  reads  his  last  directions:  Helene  may  take 
the  boy  elsewhere  and  train  him  to  a  life  of  true 
nobility — a  nobility  not  less  austere  because  it 
will  not  disdain  to  share  the  life  of  its  age  and 
country.  And  Claire  must  watch  over  these  two, 
in  utter  forgetfulness  of  self,  in  order  that  these 
wrongs  may  be,  in  some  wise,  expiated.  Are 
these  not  almost  Thyestian  horrors?  But  the 
play  burns  with  the  white  heat  of  that  unflinch- 
ing dedication  to  an  ideal  of  secular  greatness  and 
endurance.  To  be  sure,  we  do  not  believe  in 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  63 

Helene  who  speaks  the  unspeakable  truth  in  vir- 
ginal accents.  But  that  is  Curel,  whose  sense  of 
measure  and  probability  are  lost  in  his  passionate 
absorption. 

His  work  is  unequal,  violent  and  tortured  at 
its  best.  But  it  is  not  easily  forgotten,  not  lightly 
put  aside.  The  man|  seems  a  changeling  in  his 
country  of  firm,  sane  and  accomplished  masters, 
of  brilliant,  well-tempered,  intellectual  achieve- 
ment. His  public  recognition  must  always  be 
partial  and  hesitant,  and  I  am  glad  to  pay  this 
tribute  to  the  genius — however  turbid  and  how- 
ever often  touched  with  futility — of  Frangois  de 
Curel. 

Ill 

The  drama,  in  its  stricter  meaning,  attracted 
only  gradually  the  brilliant  and  varied  energies  of 
M.  Henri  Lavedan  (b.  1859) .  He  began  with  nov- 
els and  then  proceeded  to  write  down,  in  number- 
less dialogues,  which  never  attain  the  structural 
fulness  and  complexity  of  even  one-act  plays,  the 
moral  history  of  his  age.  These  dialogues  em- 
body characteristic  moments  in  the  life  of  mod- 
ern society — moments  held  fast  by  an  astonish- 
ingly acute  and  detailed  power  of  observation  and 
rendered  in  the  easiest  and  most  living  speech  to 


64  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

be  found  in  French.  They  are  prose  idylls  of 
the  decadence  of  the  neo-Latins;  they  embrace 
every  social  class  and  every  shade  of  contem- 
porary psychology.  Grouped  in  series  of  twenty 
or  thirty  under  significant  headings,  they  illus- 
trate the  fact  that  M.  Lavedan's  observation  has 
been  very  seriously  directed.  He  is  not  unaware 
of  the  possibility  that  Les  Jeunes,  Le  Lit,  Les 
Marionettes,  Leur  Beau  Physique,  Leur  Coeur, 
Leur  Soeurs,  Les  P  elites  Visites,  may  teach  the  fu- 
ture more  concerning  the  life  and  manners  of  the 
expiring  nineteenth  century  than  many  noisier  and 
more  pretentious  works.  These  studies  in  dia- 
logue do  not,  unhappily,  belong  to  my  subject 
and  I  must  pass  on  to  the  eleven  plays  which  M. 
Lavedan  has  given  to  the  French  stage,  between 
1890  and  1911. 

For  reasons  sufficiently  dark  to  a  foreigner  his 
first  play  Une  Famille  (1890)  was  crowned  by 
the  Academy  and  played  at  the  C  o  me  die-Fran- 
faise.  Virtue,  to  be  sure,  triumphs  in  the  play, 
but  the  intrigue  creaks  obviously  around  a  me- 
chanical device  to  a  hollow  ending.  One  can 
very  well  understand,  on  the  other  hand,  the  re- 
sounding success  of  Le  Prince  d'Aurec  (1892)  and 
its  sequel,  Les  deux  No  blesses  (1894),  without 
granting  either  play  a  very  high  degree  of  dra- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE          65 

matic  or  literary  value.  In  these  two  pieces  M. 
Lavedan  undertook  to  discuss  the  present  status 
and  moral  outlook  of  the  nobility  of  France.  The 
young  Prince  d'Aurec,  of  illustrious  descent  and 
noble  traditions,  is  a  typical  blageur  of  his  par- 
ticular decade.  He  jeers  at  all  the  ideals  which, 
by  his  birth  and  station,  he  should  normally  up- 
hold. A  furious  gambler,  and  on  the  point  of 
complete  ruin,  he  is  quite  willing  to  sell  the  an- 
cestral sword  of  the  Connetable  d'Aurec,  and  puts 
himself — as  does  his  wife  on  her  own  account — 
hopelessly  into  the  power  of  a  Jewish  banker. 
At  the  last  moment  the  situation  is  saved  and  the 
Prince  is  recalled  to  a  brief  consciousness  of  his 
duties  by  his  mother.  The  old  duchess,  however 
— and  here  one  at  once  surprises  M.  Lavedan's 
moral — is  not  by  birth  an  aristocrat  at  all.  She 
was  the  daughter  of  a  wealthy  merchant,  mar- 
ried for  her  money  by  the  older  d'Aurec  even  as 
Mile.  Poirier  in  Augier's  play  of  nearly  fifty 
years  before.  It  is  the  born  bourgeoise^  in  a  word, 
who  sustains  the  great  traditions  of  the  house  of 
Aurec.  And  in  Les  deux  Noblesses  it  is  by  a 
d'Aurec  who,  under  the  plebeian  name  of  Roche 
has  become  a  modern  captain  of  industry,  that 
the  fortunes  of  the  house  are  retrieved.  Of  the 
house?  Scarcely.  For  Suzanne  de  Touringe,  on 


66  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

marrying  the  oil  king's  son,  determines  to  be  sim- 
ply Mme.  Roche.  Thus  the  nobility  of  labour 
and  the  nobility  of  birth  are  not  really  blended 
into  a  new  future  for  the  aristocracy.  The  for- 
mer absorbs  the  latter  and  M.  Lavedan's  real  is- 
sue is  still  to  seek.  Technically  both  plays  are 
lumbering;  the  second  has  a  violently  melodra- 
matic plot;  the  dialogue  is,  in  many  places,  de- 
clamatory and  conventional. 

No,  it  is  not  in  these  pieces  that  I  am  able  to 
recognise  Lavedan's  permanent  contribution  to  the 
French  drama,  nor  in  the  wordy  and  flamboyant 
plays  of  a  later  period  (Le  Marquis  de  Priola, 
1902;  Le  Duel,  1905).  I  recognise  that  contri- 
bution in  the  three,  I  am  sorry  to  say,  scan- 
dalous comedies;  Viveurs  (1895),  Le  nouveau 
Jeu  (1898),  Le  vieux  Marcheur  (1894),  an<^  in 
the  mellower  tone  and  real  charm  of  his  most 
recent  play,  Le  Gout  du  Vice  (1911). 

This  play  throws  light  not  only  on  the  charac- 
ters who  appear  in  it  but  upon  the  temperament 
and  career  of  M.  Lavedan  himself.  The  taste 
for  vice,  in  its  literal  sense,  is  as  old  as  mankind. 
But  here  is  a  group  of  people  who  cultivate  it  be- 
cause it  is  the  fashion  of  the  hour,  because  they 
are  ashamed  of  goodness  and  force  themselves  to 
alien  immodesties.  How  does  the  taste  for  vice 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  67 

express  itself?  In  a  morbid  horror  of  the  impu- 
tation of  priggishness,  "in  skirting  precipices,  in 
brushing  the  wings  of  vice,  in  talking  about  im- 
possible things  and  asserting  what  one  would 
never  dare  commit."  It  is  from  such  motives 
that  M.  Lavedan's  Lortay  writes  semi-obscene  fic- 
tion, and  that  the  altogether  delightful  Mirette 
of  the  play  apes  a  corruption  of  which  she  is  in- 
capable, talks  Casanova,  and  reads  Paul  et  Vir- 
ginie.  When  they  have  found  each  other,  his  oc- 
cupation is,  quite  naturally,  gone.  "What  shall 
I  write  now4?"  he  asks  in  dismay.  "The  Distaste 
for  Vice!"  Mirette  flashes  out. 

The  whole  is  an  experience  which,  with  an 
acuter  consciousness,  of  course,  M.  Lavedan  has 
himself  known.  Viveurs,  Le  nouveau  Jeu  and  Le 
vieux  Marcheur  owe  their  stronger  and  more  vivid 
qualities  to  a  taste  for  vice.  For,  despite  an  oc- 
casional undertone  of  irony,  M.  Lavedan  is  very 
calmly  tolerant  of  these  creatures  whom  he  has 
so  magnificently  observed  and  so  tellingly  bodied 
forth.  These  plays  of  the  people  who  have  "de- 
sires, thirsts,  hungers  and  no  souls"  are  very  hon- 
estly and  solidly  built,  robustly  real  and  sober. 
They  alone,  among  Lavedan's  plays,  are  without 
shabby  concessions  to  the  mere  stage.  The  dia- 
logue in  them,  too,  is  subtle,  flexible,  unafraid  of 


68  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

reality.  The  world  they  portray  is  a  thick 
world;  it  is  concrete  and  tangible  and,  in  no  way, 
a  theatrical  schematisation  of  the  real. 

The  Viveurs  form  the  hot-eyed  rout  of  the 
boulevards,  reeling  from  one  joyless  pleasure  to 
another  in  a  restless  fever  of  attempted  forgetful- 
ness  ;  spurring  the  weary  flesh  by  new  vices — sati- 
ated and  yet  tireless.  We  see  these  women  at 
their  tailor,  the  men  and  women  at  a  night  cafe 
and  in  the  waiting  room  of  a  fashionable  physi- 
cian who  shares  their  vices  and  their  disillusion. 
From  this  crowd  there  gradually  emerges  one  al- 
most tragic  figure.  Mme.  Blandin,  stung  to  the 
soul  at  last,  implores  her  husband  for  a  different 
life.  She  is  refused  and  hurls  herself  back,  ut- 
terly desperate,  into  the  murky  stream.  Le  nou- 
veau  Jeu  is  an  abysmal  pantomime  of  arid  souls. 
Yet  it  never  abandons  the  mood  and  gait  of  com- 
edy. It  portrays  the  striving  after  what,  in  the 
more  vulgar  English  phrase,  is  "up-to-date." 
The  incidents  of  the  play  will  not  bear  telling. 
But  the  characters  stand  forth  tangibly  in  all  their 
spiritual  poverty,  and  the  note  of  irony  assumes 
a  larger  significance  at  the  play's  end.  The 
courtesan  explains  to  the  judge  of  instruction  the 
lust  for  mere  opposition  and  empty  paradox  that 
animates  this  world.  And  the  judge  bows  before 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE          69 

her  with  these  words :    "You  have  instructed  me."" 
Le  vieux  Marcheur — the  title  tells  the  story — 
ranks  in  vividness  and  solidity  somewhat  below 
its  two  predecessors. 

Such  are  the  products  of  M.  Lavedan's  taste 
for  vice.  Like  his  own  Lortay  and  Mirette  he 
has  known  the  reaction  and  in  the  second  mood 
has  written  Catherine  (1896)  and  Sire  (1909). 
But  a  reaction  from  the  contemplation  of  vice  is 
apt,  in  its  merely  negative  character,  to  fall  upon 
an  unreal  and  impossible  spotlessness.  The  peo- 
ple in  Catherine  are  of  a  hollow  perfection.  Tap 
them  and  they  will  break  like  Christmas  figurines 
— angels  and  Santa  Clauses — of  sugar  and  flour. 
Their  sentiments  are  too  correct;  their  wings  too 
unruffled.  At  one  point  in  the  third  act  a  truly 
human  difficulty  threatens  to  creep  in.  The  Due 
de  Coutras,  having  married  his  sister's  music 
teacher,  feels  the  irk  of  his  wife's  well-intentioned 
but  unmannerly  family  whom  wealth  and  ease 
are  beginning  to  corrupt.  He  criticises  even  her, 
the  blameless  Catherine  (a  modern  and  French 
Clarissa)  in  the  remark  that  the  heart,  too,  has 
its  nerves.  But  the  excessive  sweetness  of  the 
first  two  acts  settles  down  upon  the  last,  and  the 
issues  of  the  situation  are  all  shirked.  Sire  is  the 
study  of  a  beautiful,  unreal  sentiment.  A  faint 


70  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

whiff  of  lavender  exhales  from  it.  But  the  piece 
is  over-elaborate  for  so  frail  a  theme  and,  again, 
over-sweet.  No,  I  prefer  the  Lavedan  of  the 
boulevards.  He  knows  these  amusement-seek- 
ers and  ultra-moderns  and  old  rakes.  In  their 
society  he  is  unconstrained,  copious  and  exact. 
It  is  from  their  lives  that  he  has  wrung  his  best 
work.  A  powerful,  but  not  a  notably  fine  nature, 
M.  Lavedan  is  at  his  best  when  he  observes  and 
records.  This  he  has  done  in  his  dialogues  and 
in  his  three  comedies.  When  he  ceases  to  be  ob- 
jective he  becomes  violent  and  sentimental  by 
turns.  Only  in  Le  Gout  du  Vice  has  he  added 
style  and  the  fine  play  of  intelligence  to  his  work. 
Having  found  the  genre  of  his  last  comedy,  he 
should  either  cultivate  it  or  return  to  the  impas- 
sive chronicles  of  his  earlier  years. 

IV 

Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  has  recently  told  us,  with 
characteristic  vehemence  and  assurance,  that  M. 
Eugene  Brieux  (b.  1858)  is  the  greatest  French 
dramatist  since  the  seventeenth  century  and  the 
worthy  successor  of  Moliere.  In  the  same  lively 
>ssay  Mr.  Shaw  informs  us  that  the  French  Alex- 
andrine is  surpassed  in  worthlessness  as  a  literary 
medium  only  by  English  blank-verse.  So  it  is 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  71 

clear  that  Mr.  Shaw  claims  the  occasional  privi- 
lege (a  thing  not  unknown  among  men  of  genius) 
of  talking  quite  at  random.  There  are  saner  if 
quieter  ways,  surely,  of  honouring  the  arresting 
talent  and  vigorous  productivity  of  M.  Eugene 
Brieux. 

M.  Brieux  is  the  self-constituted  censor  of 
his  age.  Unlike  the  Roman  poet,  he  does  not 
scourge  the  manners  of  his  contemporaries  with 
laughter,  however  bitter,  but  with  denunciation 
and  harangue.  In  order  to  exercise  his  office  in 
the  theatre  he  has  invented  the  formula  of  the 
didactic  play.  In  act  one  the  evil  is  exhibited 
through  character  and  circumstance;  in  act  two 
its  consequences  are  set  forth;  in  act  three  it  is 
talked  about.  The  three  plays  so  widely  read  in 
America  are  but  isolated  specimens  of  the  vast 
reformatory  zeal  of  M.  Brieux.  In  the  course 
of  the  years  he  has  denounced  many  abuses  and 
instructed  the  public  on  many  subjects;  the  pur- 
suit of  mere  art,  popular  education,  parents-in- 
law,  universal  suffrage,  heredity,  charity,  divorce, 
horse-racing,  marriage,  the  administration  of  jus- 
tice, wet-nurses,  venereal  disease,  eugenics,  illicit 
love,  the  French  character,  religion.  Is  not  this 
a  prodigious  list?  I  have  not  invented  it,  how- 
ever; it  represents,  literally  and  in  chronological 


72  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

order  the  subject-matter  and  polemic  purpose  of 
M.  Brieux's  plays  from  1892  to  1907 — from 
Menages  d?  Artistes,  presented  humbly  and  after 
long  struggles  at  the  Theatre  Libre  to  La  Foi 
which  saw  the  boards  in  London  and  Paris  with 
all  the  pomp  and  circumstance  of  its  author's 
international  fame. 

I  am  not  aware  that  the  question  has  been 
asked:  What,  then,  is  M.  Brieux' s  equipment 
for  his  task?  On  what  is  based  the  magnificent 
assurance  of  his  criticism  of  society?  I  find  a 
partial  answer,  at  least,  to  these  questions  in  La 
Foi.  For  in  this  play  M.  Brieux  discusses  the 
supreme  concern  of  man — the  meaning  of  his  ex- 
istence and  his  relation  to  the  universe. 

With  marvellous  theatrical  virtuosity  Brieux 
has  for  once  transferred  his  scene  into  the  past. 
We  are  carried  to  ancient  Egypt  where  the  mys- 
terious Nile,  on  the  authority  of  Pharaohs  and 
priests,  demands  its  annual  tribute  of  human  sac- 
rifice. Now  there  arises  a  man  called  Satni  who 
has  discovered  that  there  are  no  gods.  He  calls 
to  him  the  poor  and  disinherited  of  the  land  and 
tells  them  that  by  the  mummery  of  fabled  gods, 
kings  and  priests  have  oppressed  them.  He  bids 
them  be  free  henceforth  of  both  hope  and  fear. 
The  women  mourn  the  loss  of  that  heavenly  kind- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE          73 

ness  in  which  they  had  believed;  Satni's  father 
dies  cursing  him  because  he  has  emptied  the  uni- 
verse of  hope ;  Satni  himself,  in  a  moment  of  com- 
passion for  the  poor,  lends  himself  to  the  high- 
priest's  trickery  of  false  miracles.  But  he  per- 
ceives the  deeper  bondage  that  will  follow  and 
dies  with  the  declaration  of  the  miracle's  false- 
ness upon  his  lips. 

The  fabric  of  the  play  is  dazzling  enough.  Its 
purport  is  only  too  obvious.  M.  Brieux  is  of  the 
opinion  that,  in  the  widest  sense,  there  are  no 
gods.  He  subscribes  to  the  old-fashioned  ration- 
alistic nonsense  that  religion  was  invented  or,  at 
least,  fostered  by  priests  and  kings  to  keep  the 
common  folk  in  poverty  and  subjection.  To 
slay  the  slain  is  as  futile  in  the  matter  of  argu- 
ment as  of  anything  else.  But  it  has  never,  ap- 
parently, occurred  to  M.  Brieux  that  hunger  and 
stripes  are  not  needed  to  make  us  desire  a  divine 
rather  than  a  dispeopled  universe,  and  that  his 
Pharaohs  and  high-priests,  in  moments  of  weari- 
ness and  insight,  felt  that  desire  as  profoundly 
as  their  most  abject  slaves.  The  unphilosoph- 
ical  and  unhistorical  character  of  Satni  and  M. 
Brieux's  attitude  is  as  clear  to  us  to-day  as  is  the 
village  free-thinker's  of  thirty  years  ago. 

It  is  in  the  hard  and  shallow  glare  of  such 


THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

fundamental  convictions  that  Brieux  has  called 
society  to  his  judgment  bar.  His  is  a  mind  with- 
out a  past.  History,  philosophy,  literature,  have 
taught  him  nothing.  He  relies  on  science  and 
common-sense  and  reverses,  in  all  his  mental  pro- 
cesses, the  famous  line  of  Verlaine : 

"Pas  de  couleur,  rien  que  la  nuance !" 

Now  there  are  problems  which  science  and  com- 
mon-sense are  sufficient  to  deal  with.  The  evils 
of  vicarious  motherhood  (Les  Remplagantes\ 
and  of  excessive  gambling  (Resultat  des 
Courses)  may,  no  doubt,  be  gradually  legislated 
out  of  existence  and  no  very  worthy  protest  will 
arise.  When,  however,  M.  Brieux  attacks  prob- 
lems of  greater  complexity  or  subtlety,  he  pro- 
duces either  helpless  platitudes  or — something 
worse.  At  the  end  of  her  acute  and  typical  suf- 
ferings Blanchette,  the  girl  educated  above  her 
station,  is  asked  by  her  father:  "And  so  people 
do  wrong  to  give  their  children  an  education?'* 
"No,"  Blanchette  replies,  "only  they  must  also 
give  them  some  way  of  using  it  and  not  want  to 
make  public  officials  of  them."  M.  Brieux's  con- 
clusions in  the  matter  of  charity  are  equally  novel 
and  illuminating:  "You  must  love  whom  you 
desire  to  comfort;  you  must  enclose  your  alms  in 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  75 

a  handshake."  Compare  with  these  lame  plati- 
tudes John  Galsworthy's  treatment  of  the  same 
problem  in  The  Pigeon.  In  the  answer,  finally, 
which  the  physician  in  Les  Avaries  gives  Georges 
Dupont  to  the  question  how  the  latter,  some  day, 
is  to  guide  his  son — in  this  answer,  carefully 
pruned  and  bowdlerised  in  the  American  repre- 
sentation of  Damaged  Goods — M.  Brieux  sounds 
the  depth  of  brutal  and  fatuous  inadequacy. 

But  his  authority  matches  itself  with  even 
more  delicate  and  difficult  problems :  The  pursuit 
of  art  for  its  own  sake  is  charlatanism  and  moral 
shabbiness;  the  average  marriage  of  convenience 
is  odious  but  better  than  spins terhood  or  deprav-» 
ity;  motherhood  should  be  regulated;  love  should 
not  be  curbed  by  motives  of  prudence.  To  all 
these  rules  one  may  give  a  superficial  assent.  But 
I  am  always  pursued  by  the  suspicion  that  on 
every  question — as,  so  clearly,  on  that  of  faith — 
a  great  deal  is  to  be  said  of  which  Brieux  is  con- 
stitutionally unaware,  and  that  the  real  prob- 
lem usually  begins  where  his  authoritative  plati- 
tudes end. 

Many  of  the  evils  which  he  combats,  more- 
over, are  knit  into  the  very  texture  of  human 
character.  Yet  he  appears  to  have  a  robust  faith 
that  it  needs  but  his  bustling  exposures  to  make 


76  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

men  cease  from  the  evil  which  they  do.  Not  so. 
A  merely  positivistic  and  hence,  despite  all  pre- 
tence, utilitarian  ethics  has  never  influenced  man- 
kind. An  ethics  without  foundation  in  meta- 
physics or  religion  never  will.  We  need  a  nobler 
mandate  to  secure  our  obedience.  A  voice  cry- 
ing on  the  market-place  or  from  the  stage: 
' 'There  are  no  gods !  There  is  no  divine  sanction 
in  the  universe !  But  curb  your  instincts  and  de- 
stroy abuses !" — such  a  voice,  without  persuasive- 
ness or  sweetness  or  power  will  only  alienate  wis- 
dom and  darken  counsel. 

I  have  dwelt  at  some  length  on  the  didacticism 
of  M.  Bneux  for  two  reasons:  He  is  in  danger, 
under  the  guidance  of  Mr.  Shaw,  of  being  taken 
seriously  as  a  social  philosopher;  and  because  the 
negligible  passions  of  a  secularist  preacher  have 
irretrievably  impaired  the  noblest  original, endow- 
ment for  the  art  of  the  theatre  that  modern 
France  has  produced. 

M.  Brieux  began  his  career  as  a  confirmed  nat- 
uralist, fitted,  beyond  any  other  Frenchman  to 
share  and  continue  the  triumphs  of  that  order  of 
art — the  visible  evocation  of  moral  and  material 
environments  and  the  creation  of  character.  The 
formula  of  the  didactic  play  which  he  has  in- 
vented and  practised  requires,  in  each  case,  a  first 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  77 

act  descriptive  of  the  conditions  concerning  which, 
from  about  the  middle  of  the  second  act  on,  M. 
Brieux  desired  to  discourse.  These  first  acts  are 
in  their  sober  objectivity  a  series  of  admirable  tri- 
umphs. The  symbolist  charlatans  in  Menages 
d?  Artistes,  the  peasants  and  their  world  in  Elan- 
cliette,  the  moral  turmoil  of  cheap  politics  in 
VEngrenage,  the  village  folk  in  Les  Rempla- 
gantes,  the  milliners  in  La  petite  Amie\ — these 
are  unsurpassable  in  reality,  convincingness  and 
power.  Here  are  scenes  and  characters  which 
any  dramatist  might  envy.  But  as  M.  Brieux's 
career  has  progressed  these  studies  in  reality  have 
become  fewer  and  more  superficial;  the  tide  of 
mere  words  has  risen,  and  at  the  very  height  of 
their  dramatic  passion  his  characters  have  begun 
to  break  out  into  polemic  generalisations.  Nor 
were  the  gifts  of  the  naturalist  his  only  ones.  In 
Le  Berceau  (1898)  he  treated,  five  years  before 
M.  Hervieu,  the  precise  theme  of  the  tatter's  Le 
Dedale.  Without  having  recourse  to  the  violent 
incidents  that  disfigure  M.  Hervieu's  play,  by 
sheer  power  of  analysing  the  most  delicate  con- 
flicts, moral  and  nervous,  he  achieves  a  truth  to 
which  there  is,  for  once,  no  possible  answer. 
Only,  Hervieu's  play  is  a  play  throughout;  Brieux 
talks  for  an  act  and  a  half  about  that  which,  as 


78  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

an  artist,  he  has  so  brilliantly  and  completely  set 
forth. 

A  few  times  only  in  his  long  and  busy  career 
a  spirit  of  artistic  repose  has  stolen  over  M. 
Brieux's  restless  mind.  In  La  Couvee  (1893), 
La  petite  Amie  (1902),  and  Les  Hannetons 
(1906),  he  has  respected  the  objectivity  of  the 
art  of  the  drama  and  written  entire  plays.  La 
Couvee  is  a  domestic  drama,  quiet,  delicate  and 
moving.  The  Graindor  children  have  been 
spoiled  by  their  mother's  selfish  love;  the  father's 
authority  has  been  thwarted  by  sentimentality  and 
cajolery.  Now  the  boy  and  girl  have  grown  up. 
The  boy  has  been  ruined  by  indulgence;  the  girl 
is  safely  married,  but  Mme.  Graindor  is  jealous 
of  her  son-in-law  and  kindly  enough  but  relent- 
lessly rules  the  homeless  dwelling  of  the  young 
couple.  The  husband,  with  the  co-operation  of 
his  father-in-law,  however,  asserts  the  independ- 
ence of  his  household.  Auguste  Graindor  goes  to 
Africa  and  the  parents  are  left  alone.  'The 
brood  has  grown  up;  the  little  ones  fly  from  the 
nest."  The  sadness  and  the  power  of  man's  com- 
mon lot  are  in  the  play. 

La  petite  Amie  is  a  tragedy.  Two  amiable 
souls,  devoted  to  each  other,  are  quite  literally 
forced  out  of  existence  by  the  rancorous  ambi- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  79 

tion  and  impenetrable  worldliness  of  the  youth's 
father.  One  door  of  hope  after  another  closes. 
The  evil  of  fate  is  inherent  in  the  characters  and 
in  the  social  structure.  These  characters,  espe- 
cially M.  and  Mme.  Logerais,  are  permanent  ad- 
ditions to  one's  world  of  imaginative  realities. 

I  am  almost  tempted  to  call  Les  Hannetons 
Brieux's  masterpiece.  It  is  assuredly  his  most 
finished  play.  The  situation,  that  of  a  man 
dominated  through  weakness,  habit,  nervousness, 
by  a  worthless  woman,  is  pitiful  and  sordid 
enough.  Nor  does  anything  happen.  Pierre 
thinks,  for  a  space,  that  he  has  escaped  the  yoke ; 
then  bows  his  head  again  in  fatalistic  submission. 
The  bitter  comedy — full  of  a  harsh  but  abun- 
dant comic  power — ends  where  it  began.  But  the 
thing  is  done  to  the  life;  the  inevitable  details 
are  etched  as  with  acid  upon  the  brain.  It  is 
a  "slice  of  life"  presented  in  the  simple  and  aus- 
tere fashion  of  the  great  Germanic  naturalists, 
tempered  by  the  wit  and  ease  and  mobile  energy 
of  French  art. 

The  literary  character  and  career  of  M.  Brieux 
illustrate  the  chariness  of  nature.  So  vast  an  ex- 
penditure of  power;  such  broken  and  fragmen- 
tary results!  In  a  more  reposeful  and  less  in- 
quisitive age  he  would  have  fashioned,  as  an  ar- 


8o  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

tist  should.  Or  else,  gifted  with  a  subtler  and 
more  flexible  intelligence,  he  would  have  seen 
that  art,  even  were  one  to  grant  it  the  mission  of 
practical  influence,  must  exercise  that  influence  by 
implication,  by  creation  alone.  He  was  called  to 
be  the  glory  of  the  French  stage;  he  has  sold  his 
birthright  for  a  handful  of  ephemeral  half-truths. 

That  elegant  and  reserved  artist  M.  Paul  Her- 
vieu  (b.  1857)  is  often  mentioned  side  by  side 
with  Brieux.  No  two  dramatists  could,  in  real- 
ity, present  sharper  points  of  difference.  M. 
Brieux  is  robust  and  prodigal;  M.  Hervieu,  deli- 
cate and  frugal.  Their  names  have  been  coupled 
because  they  are  both  interested  in  ideas;  but  M. 
Brieux's  ideas  are  limited  to  the  sociological  po- 
lemics of  his  time;  Hervieu  is  interested  in  those 
moral  conceptions  which  form  the  manners  and 
dictate  the  laws  of  men. 

Around  such  ideas  he  has  fashioned  plays  that 
are  unparalleled  in  their  spareness  and  concision. 
He  has  eliminated  from  them  all  elements  that 
do  not  immediately  further  or  illustrate  his  cen- 
tral and  controlling  thought.  With  the  most 
conscious  deliberation  he  denies  himself  many  of 
the  richest  qualities  of  the  modern  playwright's 
work :  moral  and  material  density  of  milieu ;  com- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE          81 

pletely  embodied  characters;  action  that  eddies  in 
the  stream  of  reality.  Milieu,  character  and  ac- 
tion, on  the  contrary,  appear  only  in  so  far  as 
they  serve  to  express  the  dominant  idea  which 
the  play  is  to  drive  home.  His  people,  in  the 
throes  of  their  particular  crises,  are  exhibited  as 
absorbed  by  these  alone,  and  are  suddenly  de- 
prived— unnaturally  but,  granting  the  method, 
logically — of  all  other  interests,  appetites,  pas- 
sions, hopes. 

There  can  be  little  doubt  but  that  in  M.  Her- 
vieu's  creative  process,  the  moral  idea  always  pre- 
cedes both  fable  and  character.  It  is,  in  truth, 
the  ideas  that  build  the  plays.  Hence  their 
structure  is  logical,  almost  abstract.  Their  rela- 
tion to  the  vast  welter  of  reality  is  like  that  born 
by  geometry  to  the  concrete  phenomena  of  space. 
M.  Hervieu  does  not  even  spare  us  the  quo d  erat 
demonstrandum  of  Euclid.  For  each  play  ends 
with  a  final  iteration  of  the  moral  truth  so  preg- 
nantly announced  in  the  exact  expressiveness  of 
his  titles.  M.  Hervieu's  rigorous  methods  are 
illustrated  in  a  very  curious  and  interesting  way 
by  some  of  these  endings.  Les  Paroles  restent 
(1892)  closes  as  follows: 

Mme.  de  Sabecourt:     Ah,  words, — they  flutter  away. 
Ligeuil:     Not  so.     Words  remain. 
The  Doctor:    And  they  kill! 


82  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

Which  is  precisely  the  truth  that  the  play  was 
written  to  prove.  Again:  The  last  speech  of 
La  Course  du  Flambeau  (1901)  is  the  tragic  cry 
of  Sabine  Revel :  'Tor  my  daughter's  sake  I  have 
killed  my  mother."  And  that  every  woman, 
given  a  cruel  conflict  of  interests  would  do  so 
is  the  play's  point.  Connais-toi  (1909)  finally, 
which  expresses,  in  so  masterly  a  way,  the  dis- 
harmony between  the  emotional  gestures  forced 
on  us  by  a  romantic  civilisation  and  our  real  feel- 
ings, ends  thus: 

General  Siberan:  Yesterday  I  would  have  deemed  my 
friend  [who  has  forgiven  his  erring  wife]  abject  and 
grotesque. 

Clarisse:     And  were  you  a  better  man  yesterday? 

General  Siberan:     I  knew  myself  less  well. 

Clarisse:     Ah,  who  knows  himself*? 

M.  Hervieu's  technique,  then,  has  the  severe 
beauty  of  the  abstract.  He  sacrifices,  I  fear,  a 
higher  and  richer  beauty.  But  it  is  not  the 
critic's  business  to  quarrel  with  an  artist's  chosen 
methods,  only  with  the  artist's  disloyalty  to  them.  \ 
Such  disloyalty  is  rare  in  M.  Hervieu's  work. 
Only  now  and  then  may  one  detect — as  in  the 
romantic  accidents  in  the  fourth  act  of  La  Course 
du  Flambeau  or  the  mechanism  on  which  the  ac- 
tion of  Le  Reveil  hinges — an  unscrupulous  eager- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  83 

ness  to  point  the  moral  sharply.  Of  adornment 
M.  Hervieu  is  never  eager.  He  is  the  ascetic 
servant  of  moral  ideas. 

I  hasten  to  dispose  of  the  one  adverse  criticism 
which  the  workmanship  of  this  sane  and  admir- 
able artist  can  never  wholly  escape.  His  dia- 
logue is  often  tortured  and  often  extravagant.  A 
rather  sober  young  financier  and  manufacturer  is 
made  to  say  to  the  young  woman  who  has  just 
accepted  him:  "You  make  me  mad  for  joy;  I 
would  like  to  fall  on  my  knees  and  cry  out  my 
happiness"  (La  Course  du  Flambeau).  "Make 
me  to  know,"  says  a  man  to  a  woman  in  Le 
Reveil,  "every  shadow  that  may  appear  under 
your  brow,  in  order  that  I  may  obliterate  it  gently 
with  my  kisses."  In  Connais-toi  a  suspected  wife 
says  to  her  husband :  "You  may  bump  my  skull 
against  the  wall  and  you  will  make  no  further  ex- 
planations spurt  forth."  A  close  thinker,  a  not- 
able artist  in  the  structure  of  his  work,  M.  Her- 
vieu seems  to  lack  the  narrower  sense  for  style 
as  a  fine  adaptation  of  verbal  means  to  ends.  It 
is  but  just  to  add  that  in  his  latest  play  Baga- 
telle (1912)  the  dialogue  shows  greater  modera- 
tion and  dignity. 

The  chief  plays  of  M.  Hervieu  may  be  divided 
into  three  groups:  those  in  which  he  seeks  to  il- 


84  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

lustrate  universal  moral  truths ;  those  in  which  he 
attacks  a  false  moral  idea  embodied  in  an  unjust 
law;  those  in  which  he  dissects  the  romantic  tra- 
ditions of  our  emotional  life. 

To  the  first  group  belong  Les  Paroles  restent, 
La  Course  du  Flambeau,  and  Le  Dedale.  Les 
Paroles  restent  relates  the  story  of  a  slander  in- 
nocently set  afloat.  The  lie  corrupts  and  cor- 
rodes the  social  existence  and  spiritual  peace  of 
several  lives  and,  in  the  end,  quite  literally  slays. 
Le  Dedale  seeks  to  translate  into  an  overwhelm- 
ingly compelling  action — an  action  which,  un- 
happily, flares  into  melodrama  in  the  fifth  act — 
the  moral  impossibility  of  divorce,  if  there  be  a 
child.  But  La  Course  du  Flambeau  is  the  most 
notable  drama  in  this  group.  Sabine  Revel,  a 
widow  of  thirty-six,  lives  with  her  mother  Mme. 
Fontanes  upon  whom  she  is  economically  depend- 
ent, and  her  daughter  Marie-Jeanne.  Early  in 
the  first  act  an  old  friend  of  the  family  announces 
the  theme  in  speaking  to  Sabine:  "You  do  not 
know  all  your  worth  as  a  mother.  And  you  will 
never  know,  I  trust,  the  slightness  of  your  worth 
as  a  daughter.  Such  truths  are  not  learned  when 
life  is  quiet  and  harmonious,  but  amid  violent 
trials  and  bitter  cries."  Then  the  illustrative  ac- 
tion sets  in.  Sabine  sends  away  beyond  recall 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  85 

the  man  she  loves  because  she  will  not  rob  Marie 
of  her  entire  love  and  care  until  the  latter  no 
longer  needs  them.  Scarcely  has  Stangy  gone 
than  Marie  announces  her  betrothal  to  Didier 
Maravon.  Sabine  has  thrown  away  her  future  in 
vain.  Four  years  of  happy  marriage  pass  for 
Marie  when  Didier  finds  himself  ruined.  His 
honour  is  unimpaired  but  he  needs  three  hundred 
thousand  francs  to  settle  with  his  creditors  and 
regain  his  financial  stability.  Sabine  appeals  to 
her  mother.  But  the  refusal  of  Mme.  Fontanes 
is  unconditional.  She  will  neither  impoverish 
her  daughter,  nor  break  the  promise  given  to  her 
dead  husband  not  to  alienate  his  hard-earned 
capital.  Marie,  in  her  despair,  actually  re- 
proaches Sabine  for  not  having  married  Stangy, 
and  forces  her  to  write  to  him  to  America  for 
help.  Delay  follows  delay.  Sabine  attempts 
forgery  but  is  unsuccessful.  Marie's  health 
breaks  down.  She  is  ordered  to  the  Engadine,  but 
the  doctor  warns  Sabine  that  Mme.  Fontanes, 
who  has  a  lesion  of  the  heart,  must  not  risk  that 
altitude.  Mme.  Fontanes,  ignorant  of  her  dan- 
ger and  irritated  at  Sabine's  maternal  egotism,  in- 
sists on  either  keeping  Sabine  with  her  or  mak- 
ing the  journey.  Sabine,  rather  than  see  her  place 
near  her  child  taken  by  a  nurse,  consents  to  Mme. 


86  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

Fontanes  going.  In  the  Swiss  hotel  Stangy  ap- 
pears, married  alas,  but  wealthy  and  full  of  his 
old  kindness.  He  offers  Didier  a  position  in 
America  which  the  latter  and  Marie  joyfully  ac- 
cept. Greatly  and  passionately  Sabine  pleads 
with  her  daughter  not  to  leave  her.  But  Marie 
follows  her  husband.  The  tragic  woman  turns 
to  her  mother :  "Mother,  I  have  only  you ;  I  have 
never  had  any  one  but  you!"  And  Mme.  Fon- 
tanes falls  dead.  The  play  is  almost  unbearably 
poignant.  For  the  idea  presented  with  so  much 
power,  if  with  some  exaggeration,  is  one  which 
cuts  at  the  root  of  our  pretensions  and  of  our  self- 
esteem. 

The  moral  idea  which,  crystallised  in  custom 
and  law,  M.  Hervieu  has  most  bitterly  attacked, 
is  that  of  the  final  dominance  of  the  man  in  mar- 
riage. In  Les  Tenailles  (1895)  anc^  La  Loi  de 
rhomme  (1897)  he  shows  two  marriages,  both  ir- 
retrievably ruined:  one  by  a  lack  of  sympathy 
and  affection;  one  by  the  husband's  flagrant  in- 
fidelity. Yet  neither  of  these  marriages  could  be 
dissolved  according  to  the  then  law  of  France. 
That  law,  by  giving  the  power  of  ultimate  deci- 
sion to  the  man  alone,  imprisons  Irene  Fergan  in 
Les  Tenailles  and  condemns  Laure  de  Raguais  in 
La  Loi  de  rhomme  to  an  even  more  shameful 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  87 

bondage  by  demanding  for  her  husband's  indis- 
putable misdeed  a  kind  of  proof  impossible  to 
obtain.  Both  marriages  could,  of  course,  have 
been  dissolved  had  the  two  men  been  willing  to 
lend  their  aid  to  the  necessary  steps.  At  this 
point,  however,  enters  the  characteristically 
French  conception  of  marriage  as  primarily  a  so- 
cial institution  and  hardly  at  all  as  a  union  of 
free  personalities.  Fergan  and  Raguais,  though 
calmly  convinced  that  marriage  has  ceased  to 
mean  anything  to  them  personally,  refuse  to  en- 
visage the  possibility  of  divorce.  They  are  un- 
willing to  incur  the  moral,  material  and  social 
diminution  of  their  power  and  status  which  di- 
vorce would  entail.  One  can,  at  least,  they 
agree,  keep  one's  personal  dignity  and  present  an 
uncrumbled  social  facade  to  society.  It  is  against 
this  conception  of  marriage  that,  in  the  last  analy- 
sis, M.  Hervieu  directs  his  weapons.  And  he  is 
at  no  loss  to  show,  with  the  full  brilliancy  of  his 
execution,  the  evil  and  the  sorrow  that  arise  from 
the  pressure  of  such  meaningless  bondage.  It  is 
to  be  remembered,  on  the  other  hand,  that  mar- 
riage, however  high  and  free  its  original  motives, 
has  a  habit,  in  this  work-a-day  world,  of  becom- 
ing an  institution  into  which  are  inextricably 
knotted  all  the  strands  that  bind  men  and  women 


88  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

to  their  kind.  Hence  its  dissolution  may  be,  in 
the  totality  of  consequences,  more  widely  tragic 
than  even  a  hunger  of  the  heart. 

To  views  of  this  character  M.  Hervieu  has 
come  very  close  in  Le  Reveil  (1905)  and  Con- 
nais-toi  (1909).  These  two  plays  belong,  of 
course,  to  the  latest  and,  I  suspect,  the  final  period 
of  his  development — the  anti-romantic.  It  is  not 
a  false  or  pinchbeck  romance  that  M.  Hervieu 
deprecates,  but  two  notions,  both  Christian  and 
romantic,  and  both  deeply  rooted  in  the  conscious- 
ness of  Western  society — the  beauty  of  romantic 
passion,  the  nobility  of  romantic  honour.  Rapt 
to  their  heights  of  passionate  enchantment  Therese 
Megee  and  Prince  Jean  in  Le  Reveil  are  made 
suddenly  to  feel  the  touch  of  our  real  destiny 
and  of  our  real  duties.  And  at  that  touch  the 
enchantment  vanishes.  At  once  they  see  each 
other  and  their  passion  in  the  light  of  common 
day  and  it  falls  away  from  them  like  an  outworn 
garment.  In  Connais~toi,  by  a  quieter  and  more 
masterly  course  of  dramatic  reasoning,  General 
Siberan  is  brought  to  see  that  beyond  the  tradi- 
tional notions  of  romantic  honour  and  revenge 
there  watches  in  the  human  heart  a  better  and 
more  patient  vision.  M.  Hervieu's  last  play 
Bagatelle  (1912)  is  larger  in  spirit  and  mellower 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  89 

than  any  of  these.  Its  theme  is  the  vanity  of  all 
mere  vanities;  its  warning  that  we  curb  the  errors 
of  our  own  inconstant  hearts. 

Twice  only  has  M.  Hervieu  turned  aside  from 
the  exposition  of  moral  ideas:  once  in  his  his- 
torical play  Theroigne  de  Mericourt  (1902),  and 
once  in  that  very  skilful  but  somewhat  factitious 
display  of  stage-craft  UEnigme  (1901).  In  the 
remaining  eight  plays  the  moral  conception  is  su- 
preme. Nor  need  it  surprise  even  the  non-Latin 
student  of  the  drama  that  six  of  these  eight  plays 
deal  with  adultery.  For  around  the  relations  of 
the  sexes  in  marriage  are  gathered  many  of  those 
fundamental  impulses  which  guide  our  opinions 
and  our  conduct.  Nevertheless  I  cannot  believe 
that  the  name  of  a  great  master  will  be  perma- 
nently given  to  one  whose  intensity  of  moral  in- 
sight is  won  at  the  cost  of  such  vast  exclusions. 
But  that  intensity  of  insight  is  his,  and  a  power 
of  reasoning  in  dramatic  form  analogous  to  Dry- 
den's  power  of  reasoning  in  poetic  form.  To  the 
French  playwright,  as  to  the  English  poet,  were 
given  energy  and  intellectual  intensity;  to  neither, 
that  larger  vision  that  sees  life  not  only  steadily 
but  sees  it  whole. 


90  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 


M.  Jules  Lemaitre  (b.  1853)  is  not  a  member 
of  any  school  or  movement;  he  pleads  for  no  defi- 
nite ideas,  for  no  special  view  of  life.  Even  his 
technique  recalls,  at  times,  the  older  procedures 
of  Augier  and  Dumas  fils.  He  is  not  even  afraid 
to  close  a  play  by  means  of  the  quite  vicious  trick 
of  a  sudden  turn  in  the  psychology  of  his  char- 
acters, as  witness  the  endings  of  Revoltee  (1889) 
and  of  UAge  difficile  (1895).  ^n  a  word,  his 
methods  are  eclectic.  The  great  critic,  the  wise 
and  exquisite  master  of  Les  Contemporains, 
stands  above  the  literature  which  he  has  described 
so  incomparably — "the  intelligent,  restless,  mad, 
sombre,  unguided  literature  of  the  second  half  of 
the  nineteenth  century"  * — with  an  air  of  friendly 
but  serene  detachment.  He  understands  all  the 
artistic  battles  of  his  time  too  well  to  be  induced 
to  serve  under  any  standard. 

The  individual  note,  however,  which  M.  Le- 
maitre has  contributed  to  the  drama  of  his  period 
is  that  of  a  sane  and  liberal  humanity.  His  is 
neither  the  contemptuous  tolerance  of  Lavedan 
nor  the  noisy  Puritanism  of  Brieux.  A  spirit  that 
has  dwelt  imaginatively  in  all  times  and  in  all 
literatures  is  incapable  of  either  extreme.  Hence 

iLes  Contemporains.    Vol.  I,  p.  239. 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  91 

the  surface  of  his  dramatic  work  is  never  hard 
and  brittle  but  always  suffused  with  the  warm 
glow  of  life.  His  understanding  charity  em- 
braces the  "fault"  of  Mme.  de  Voves  in  Revoltee 
and  the  almost  attractive  corruption  of  Yoyo — 
significant  syllables! — in  L'Age  difficile,  as  well 
as  the  antics  of  the  amusing  players  in  Flipote 
(1893).  Life  having  been  in  all  ages  a  matter 
so  incalculable  and  mysterious,  our  vices  and  our 
virtues  being  equally  immemorial,  M.  Lemaitre 
does  not  feel  that  he  can  afford  a  vain  severity. 
He  understands  his  people ;  that  is  enough.  I  do 
not  wish  to  convey  the  impression  that  M.  Le- 
maitre has  not  his  moral  preferences  or  fails  to 
see  that  the  practical  business  of  the  world  needs 
definite  moral  adjustments.  He  has  expressed 
himself  unmistakably  to  that  effect  through  the 
withering  portrait  of  a  political  opportunist  and 
self-seeker  in  Le  Depute  Leveau  (1890). 

He  has  concentrated  all  the  most  charming 
qualities  of  his  dramatic  talent  in  Le  Pardon 
(1895).  The  play  has  three  full-sized  acts,  ob- 
serves the  unity  of  place,  and  has  only  three  char- 
acters— the  smallest  number  in  any  modern 
drama.  It  follows  that,  in  a  sense,  the  play  is 
really  all  talk,  but  that  talk  was  written  by  one 
of  the  major  prose  artists  of  French  litera- 


92  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

ture  and,  furthermore,  reveals  M.  Lemaitre  as  a 
psychologist  equal  in  acuteness  and  delicacy  to 
any  of  his  period.  The  theme  of  the  play  is,  I 
had  almost  said  inevitably,  that  of  marital  infi- 
delity, around  which,  despite  M.  Brieux's  denial 
in  La  Frangaise,  the  interest  of  French  society 
and  literature  so  largely  turns.  Suzanne,  conven- 
tionally married  off  at  eighteen,  is  left  to  herself 
too  much  in  the  enforced  idleness  of  the  modem 
woman.  Her  husband  Georges,  though  exclu- 
sively devoted  to  her,  is  often  absent  in  the  pur- 
suit of  his  affairs.  In  her  idleness  and  loneliness 
Suzanne  slips  into  a  loveless  intrigue.  Georges 
discovers  it,  drives  her  out,  and  leaves  to  take  a 
position  in  the  factory  of  a  former  playmate's  hus- 
band. Therese,  his  old  friend,  now  secretly  sum- 
mons Suzanne  to  her  home  (where  the  action  of 
the  play  is  laid)  and  by  a  train  of  very  fine  psy- 
chological reasoning  which  reveals  Georges'  most 
intimate  desires  to  himself,  persuades  him  to  par- 
don his  wife.  To  pardon  her!  There  lies  the 
difficulty.  She  cannot  teach  him  to  forget.  He 
torments  Suzanne  with  questions,  unworthy  sus- 
picions and  cruel  innuendoes.  The  memory  of 
the  tremendous  physical  fact  is  like  an  inexpug- 
nable poison  in  his  blood.  His  single  consolation 
is  in  his  walks  with  Therese,  in  whom  he  con- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  93 

fides,  who  consoles  him,  and  who,  alas,  has  al- 
ways loved  him.  The  result  is  only  too  natural 
and  Suzanne  is  clearly  enough  instructed  when 
Georges,  no  longer  upbraiding  her  or  torturing 
himself,  exclaims:  "Let  us  not  be  dramatic  and 
sensitive.  That's  the  mistake!"  She  does  not 
feel  that  she  has  the  right  to  reproach  him;  but 
she  turns  bitterly  upon  Therese.  Poor  Therese, 
however,  has  discovered  by  this  time  that  Georges 
does  not  really  love  her;  that  it  was  his  wounded 
love  for  his  wife  that  threw  him  into  her  arms. 
She  expiates  her  wrong  by  this  humiliating  con- 
fession and  leaves  Georges  and  Suzanne  alone. 
And  now?  Georges  has  searched  his  heart  and 
discovered  that  the  keenest  sting  of  Suzanne's  un- 
faithfulness was  to  his  outraged  male  vanity. 
That  sting  is  now  blunted,  that  vanity  is  now  as- 
suaged. They  are  both  miserable  sinners,  and  in 
the  recognition  of  their  common  frailty  may  love 
each  other  again.  The  psychology  is  exquisite, 
the  dialogue  of  an  extreme  and  plangent  beauty. 
The  play  rises  beyond  argument  and  analysis  to 
a  sad  vision  of  the  heart  of  man.  We  are  not  as- 
sured that  Georges  and  Suzanne  will  be  happy; 
we  have  only  felt  that  they  are  human  and  sin- 
cere. 

M.    Lemaitre's    range    of    subject-matter    has 


94  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

been  wide  and  he  has  written  plays  of  very  vary- 
ing moods.  Marriage  blanc  (1891)  is  a  study 
in  morbid  psychology  flooded  with  that  dry,  hard 
sunshine  which  invalids  watch  in  the  South  of 
France;  Flipote  is  a  satiric  comedy  which  one 
might  almost  call  high-spirited;  L'Age  difficile  is 
a  satiric  treatment  of  a  sufficiently  tragic  subject 
— the  loneliness  of  age.  But  here,  as  elsewhere, 
the  wise  and  tender  humanity  of  M.  Lemaitre 
sounds  its  clarifying  and  reconciling  note. 

His  activity  as  a  dramatist  has  been  circum- 
scribed rather  narrowly,  nor  has  it  ever  reached  a 
very  large  public.  Its  qualities  of  ease  and  grace 
and  philosophic  temperateness  make  one  regret 
that  it  is  not  the  drama  rather  than  politics  that 
has  robbed  the  world  of  several  volumes  by  the 
greatest  of  the  living  critics  of  literature.1 

Beautifully  written  dialogue  and  a  mellow  hu- 
manity ally  the  dramas  of  M.  Maurice  Donnay 
(b.  1859)  to  those  of  M.  Jules  Lemaitre.  To 
these  qualities  M.  Donnay  adds  an  almost  lyric 
note  of  speech  and — in  the  majority  of  his  plays 
— the  best  structural  technique  on  the  French 
'  stage.  M.  Donnay  has  found  it  possible  to  dis- 

i  Now,  alas,  no  longer  among  the  living.  But  these  pages 
may  stand  as  I  wrote  them. 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE          95 

pense  wholly  with  plot,  with  artificial  rearrange- 
ment of  events,  with  mere  cleverness  of  combina- 
tion. Like  the  Germanic  playwrights,  he  simply 
lets  life  unfold  itself.  The  situations  in  his  plays, 
are  states  of  soul  and  these  merge  into  each  other 
according  to  the  succession  of  reality,  not  accord- 
ing to  the  pattern  of  the  theatre.  Even  when 
pleading  for  an  idea,  his  concern  for  it  is  a  mar- 
vel of  discretion.  The  play  is  over  before  his 
process  of  insensible  persuasion  becomes  retro- 
spectively clear. 

His  subject  is  love — modern  love.  Of  its 
troubles,  its  difficulties,  its  tragedies,  he  is  as 
acutely  aware  as  M.  de  Porto-Riche.  But  to  him 
— and  in  this  he  differs  from  the  older  dramatist 
— its  delights  and  memories  appear  the  fairest 

"Part  of  our  lives'  unalterable  good." 

Neither  his  attempts  at  Aristophanic  satire  nor  his 
criticisms  of  a  depraved  society  contribute  so  rare 
and  individual  a  note  to  the  modern  French 
drama  as  does  the  haec  olim  meminisse  juvat 
which  vibrates  in  the  passion  of  Amants  (1895), 
L'Autre  Danger  (1905),  and  even,  at  its  close, 
of  Les  Eclaireuses  (1913). 

I  am  tempted  to  call  Amants  a  modern  Romeo 
and  Juliet.  It  is  easy  to  anticipate  the  answer :  • 


96  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

A  very  modern  Romeo  and  Juliet  indeed!  No 
doubt.  Yet  one  might  easily  indicate  the  theine 
of  the  two  plays  in  the  same  words :  Two  human 
beings  who  love  each  other  utterly  are  separated 
by  social  and  moral  barriers  peculiar  to  their  time 
and  place  and  character.  Shakespeare's  young 
Italians  die;  M.  Donnay's  modern  French  lovers 
separate  and  each  marries  some  one  else.  Yet  I 
am  convinced,  paradoxical  as  it  may  seem,  that 
Claudine  Rozay  and  Vetheuil  had  a  far  deeper 
capacity  for  tragic  grief  than  those  young  amor- 
ists of  the  Renaissance.  They  seem  grey  enough 
by  comparison.  No  Shakespeare  has  lent  them 
the  divine  energy  of  his  verse ;  they  are  intelligent 
members  of  a  highly  complex  society  which  fur- 
nishes them  with  duties  and  restraints.  A  dagger 
and  a  tomb  are  fine  properties  with  which  to  make 
a  brave  show  on  the  stage  of  this  world.  But 
that  brief  and  almost  harsh  farewell  which  Clau- 
dine and  Vetheuil  say  to  each  other  by  the  shores 
of  the  Mediterranean  has  the  high  and  tragic 
beauty  of  all  entire  sincerity  of  suffering.  That, 
after  an  interval  of  time,  these  lovers  can  meet 
again  with  a  sad  equanimity  and  that  each  can 
pursue  his  way  does  not  cheapen  them  when 
rightly  thought  upon.  The  best  that  was  in  each 
was  given  to  the  other.  Time  could  not  rob  them 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  97 

of  their  past.     And  it  is  braver  to  live  than  to 
die :  more  difficult  to  be  than  not  to  be. 

A  wise  and  noble  resignation  to  the  inevitable 
rather  than  a  vain  striving  and  crying  is  char- 
acteristic of  M.  Donnay's  people.  Consider  the 
fate  of  Claire  Jadain  in  L'Autre  Danger.  Her 
husband  is  an  impossible  person — self-opinion- 
ated, tyrannical,  meanly  envious.  For  four  years 
the  love  of  Freydieres  compensates  her  for  all  the 
sterile  spaces  of  her  past.  Though  their  love 
must  live  a  shadowy  existence,  since  her  maternal 
duties  bind  her  to  her  home,  it  has  come  to  mean 
to  her  the  whole  of  life.  Then  comes,  by  imper- 
ceptible degrees  that  "other  danger"  which,  de- 
spite the  innumerable  French  studies  of  passion, 
is  here  pointed  out  for  the  first  time.  Claire's 
daughter  Madeleine  has  become  a  woman  in  the 
four  years,  and  Madeleine  loves  Freydieres.  At 
her  first  ball  the  young  girl  hears  an  evil  whisper 
coupling  the  names  of  Freydieres  and  her  mother. 
It  is  like  a  death  blow  to  her  white  soul.  And  it 
is  evident  to  Claire  that  only  by  a  complete  an- 
nihilation of  self  can  she  give  the  lie  to  the  ru- 
mour and — in  the  truest  sense — save  her  child's 
life  and  the  sacredness  of  her  own  motherhood. 
She  addresses  herself  to  the  terrible  task  of  re- 
vealing to  Freydieres  (what  she  has  never  yet 


98  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

dared  to  admit  even  to  herself)  that  he,  too,  loves 
Madeleine.  "I  ought  to  have  foreseen  that  some 
day  Madeleine  would  be  eighteen;  but  one  never 
thinks  of  that  other  danger."  Freydieres  strug- 
gles against  the  spiritual  monstrousness  of  the 
situation,  but  Claire  sends  Madeleine  to  him. 
Silence  and  resignation  are  her  portion.  The 
closest  observation  went  to  the  making  of  the 
play,  the  unravelling  of  almost  invisible  psychical 
threads.  A  coarse  hand  would  have  made  the 
fable  revolting.  It  is  beautiful  and  tragic  here. 
M.  Donnay's  latest  play,  which  served  to  in- 
augurate a  new  Parisian  theatre — La  Comedie 
Marigny — depicts  the  very  advanced  feminists 
of  the  French  capital.  These  ladies  (Les  ficlair- 
euses}  are  extremely  alive  nor  are  they  without 
many  admirable  traits.  Indeed  there  is  no  limit 
to  M.  Donnay's  generosity  to  them.  The  pro- 
tagonist of  the  play  and  chief  practical  supporter 
of  Vecole  feministe  is  Mme.  Jeanne  Dureille  who 
gets  a  divorce  from  her  husband  simply  because 
the  social  male  cannot  strip  himself  of  those  au- 
thoritative airs  which  society  has  so  long  accorded 
him.  Jeanne  now  lives  in  complete  devotion  to 
the  Cause.  But  gradually  and  by  imperceptible 
degrees  a  curious  shadow  steals  over  her  inner  life. 
And,  in  the  end,  there  flickers  from  that  shadow 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE  99 

— a  light.  She  really  left  her  husband  because, 
in  the  obscure  hiding-places  of  the  heart,  she 
loved  Jacques  Leholloy.  She  gives  herself  to 
him  and  finally,  amid  the  inevitable  annoyances 
of  life,  flees  to  the  shelter  of  his  home  and  love. 
This  household  will  be  a  very  modern  one,  no 
doubt;  Jacques  is  a  feminist  himself.  But  M. 
Donnay  at  least  permits  one  to  suspect  that  many 
traditional  elements  will  gently  steal  back  into 
this  modern  menage.  For  Jacques  admits  that 
the  crude  radicalism  of  nineteen  hundred  is  no 
longer  his.  It  is  now  nineteen  hundred  and  thir- 
teen. And  Jeanne  comes  to  him  for  the  oldest 
and  best  reason  of  all — seeking  a  friend,  indeed, 
but  also  a  husband  and  protector. 

It  is  the  engaging  sincerity  of  M.  Donnay  that 
makes  him  one  of  the  most  delightful  of  modern 
dramatists.  His  observation  is  honest  and  exact. 
Nor,  granting  its  fundamental  artifice,  is  it  easy 
to  praise  too  highly  the  eloquent  modulations  of 
his  prose.  His  work  is  not  that  of  a  very  great 
spirit  but  of  a  gifted  and  kindly  gentleman  who 
understands  his  fellow-creatures  well  enough  to 
forgive  them,  invariably — for  what  they  are. 


loo          THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

VI 

From  this  interpretative  description  of  the 
chief  playwrights  of  modern  France  and  of  their 
work,  several  significant  facts,  I  trust,  appear  at 
once:  This  drama  is  based  upon  an  observation 
that  is  often  very  exact  within  its  limits  but,  ex- 
cept for  occasional  acts  and  scenes  by  M.  Brieux, 
neither  many-sided  nor  solid.  The  life  it  treats 
is,  as  a  rule,  the  life  of  those  who  need  neither 
toil  nor  spin.  The  common  people,  the  middle 
classes,  are  left,  once  more  except  by  M.  Brieux, 
almost  in  silence.  Yet  even  the  life  of  these  ad- 
mirable idlers  is  not  touched  at  very  many  points, 
and  one's  final  impression  of  them  is  that  of  crea- 
tures of  but  two  dimensions.  Love  and  passion 
do,  no  doubt,  play  a  very  large  part  in  life,  espe- 
cially in  such  lives.  But  these  elegant  and  inter- 
esting persons  must,  after  all,  have  had  a  hundred 
other  concerns,  a  hundred  other  contacts  with  real- 
ity. This  criticism  is  not  made  in  the  service  of 
a  cheap  moral  rigidness.  The  weakness  of  this 
drama  is  not  in  what  it  gives,  but  in  what  it  fails 
to  give.  Life  in  it  is  reduced  to  a  few  terms  and 
these  terms  are  far  too  often  the  same.  A  great 
and  full-bodied  art  is  more  inclusive.  Emma 
Bovary  had  her  affairs  too,  and  these  affairs  were 


THE  DRAMA  IN  FRANCE         101 

decisive  factors  in  her  fate.  But  that  fate  and 
life  was  magnificently  founded  in  time  and  place 
and  those  humble  but  enduring  things  and  activi- 
ties that  form  the  dense  texture  of  human  exist- 
ence. Nor  is  that  tenuousness  of  representation 
inherent  in  the  form  of  the  drama.  A  series  of 
notable  playwrights,  from  Becque  to  Galsworthy, 
have  proven  the  contrary. 

Nor,  finally,  am  I  willing  to  believe  that  per- 
sons so  extraordinarily  intelligent  and  fine-fibred 
as  the  characters  of  Porto-Riche  and  Hervieu,  Le- 
maitre  and  Donnay,  are  so  utterly  incapable  of 
rising,  if  but  for  a  moment,  above  the  immediate 
illusions  of  life,  or  are  so  helplessly  driven  by 
the  cruel  flux  of  the  phenomenal  world.  Do  they 
never  cast  off  that  illusion?  Do  they  never  feel 
some  cool  wind  from  the  shores  of  a  larger  order? 
Is  a  worldly  resignation  their  last  resort?  Do 
they  never  rise  beyond  social  values,  and  are 
truths  of  a  merely  social  observation,  however 
exquisitely  subtle,  their  only  refuge?  A  man,  let 
us  assume,  is  smitten  by  some  cruel  grief  or  dis- 
honour— Doncieres  in  Connais-toi,  Georges  in  Le 
Passe.  From  the  throbbing  heat  of  his  human 
habitation,  from  the  faces  worn  with  sorrow  and 
shame,  from  the  voices  that  sob  or  plead,  he  goes 
out  into  the  open.  The  hills  curve  dark  against 


102         THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

the  sky,  the  ancient  stones  of  the  earth  are  patient 
under  the  stars.  And  the  man,  freed  from  the 
immediate  passion  of  the  hour,  remembers  the 
generations  of  the  dead  who,  too,  have  tasted  this 
pang,  this  shame,  and  he  remembers  the  vastness 
of  the  eternal  order.  He  may  hope  that  in  that 
order  a  divine  vigilance  is  awake,  or  he  may  de- 
spair of  such  a  hope.  But  he  has  shaken  off,  for 
one  hour,  the  insistent  illusions  of  mortality,  and 
that  hour  will  vibrate  in  his  life  and  speech. 
Such  an  incident  is  typical,  I  take  it,  of  a  thou- 
sand. It  cannot  appear  on  the  stage.  But  we 
may  hear  its  liberating  echo  in  the  words  of  men. 
They  are  freed  from  the  laws  of  the  transitory 
and  united  to  the  universe  in  which  they  live. 
That  echo,  that  note  of  liberation,  is  never  heard 
in  the  drama  of  contemporary  France.  Hence 
from  a  body  of  work  so  brilliant,  so  alluring,  so 
intelligent  and,  within  its  own  limits,  so  true,  I 
turn  with  something  not  unlike  relief  to  the  more 
sombre  but  profounder  dramatic  literature  of  Ger- 
many and  England. 


CHAPTER  THREE 
THE  NATURALISTIC  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY 


THE  drama  of  modern  Germany  has  broken  more 
completely  with  the  past  than  any  other  body  of 
contemporary  literature.  To  a  recognition  of  the 
empty  and  meaningless  artifice  of  the  technique 
of  Scribe,  Sardou  and  even  Dumas  fits,  the  Ger- 
mans added  a  national  antipathy  to  a  form  of  art 
not  only  base  but  foreign,  not  only  foreign  but 
all-powerful.  The  society  play  of  the  older 
French  school,  transferred  to  German  conditions 
by  Paul  Lindau,  Oscar  Blumenthal  and  others, 
monopolised  the  stage  during  the  years  that  im- 
mediately followed  the  establishment  of  the  em- 
pire. The  sounding  historical  plays  of  Ernst  von 
Wildenbruch  brought  a  larger  air  into  the  weary 
disillusion  that  held  the  theatres.  But  here  was, 
after  all,  no  new  art,  no  sense  of  liberation  for 
the  young  revolutionists  who  crowded  the  Berlin- 
cafes  and  prophesied  a  dawn  of  which  no  actiake 

glimmer  had  yet  appeared  on  the  dull  kve  writ- 

103 


104          THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

They  had  all,  or  nearly  all,  a  pathetic  faith  in 
modern  science.  Hence  they  were  forced,  once 
more,  to  turn  to  France  where  alone,  in  the 
pseudo-naturalism  of  Zola,  science  had  apparently 
created  a  literature  in  its  own  spirit.  But  this 
literature  was  neither  new  in  the  eighties,  nor  was 
it  in  dramatic  form.  The  Goncourts,  Zola, 
Daudet,  had  never  succeeded  in  conquering  the 
theatre  for  naturalism.  The  Scandinavian  theatre 
was  not  yet  a  living  force  in  Europe,  nor  could 
the  young  Germans  have  learned  anything  new 
from  the  methods  of  Ibsen.  Hence,  for  some 
years,  the  drama  hovered  between  two  worlds, 
"one  dead,  the  other  powerless  to  be  born."  But 
even  to  the  distant  observer  of  to-day  there  floats 
a  sense  of  the  stir,  the  hope,  the  passionate  and 
prophetic  strife  of  those  obscure  days  in  which 
the  germs  of  the  modern  drama  were  ripening  in 
the  souls  of  unguided  and  still  inglorious  youths. 
Societies  were  formed  and  programmes  writ- 
ten and  periodicals  founded.  The  cry  that  arose 
with  such  generous  earnestness  from  all  these 
movements  was  for  an  art  that  should  mirror, 
and  thus  implicitly  interpret,  the  contemporary 
-md  the  real — this  immediate  world  whose  sting 
->ang  and  savour  and  visible  form  are  the 
•••ntents  of  our  experience  and  of  our  lives. 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY      105 

This  world  was  not  to  be  shattered  and  rebuilt 
according  to  the  conventions  of  the  theatre.  Art 
was  to  triumph  over  itself,  to  transcend  itself;  to 
become,  in  the  fullest  sense,  a  vicarious  experi- 
ence through  which  we  might  learn  to  pity  the 
fate  of  others  and  to  endure  our  own. 

It  is  abundantly  clear  that  such  an  art — an 
art  which  was  to  create  the  complete  illusion  of 
reality — needed  methods  that  had  never,  con- 
sciou§ly,  and  purposefully  at  least,  been  prac- 
tised before.  There  are,  no  doubt,  pages  of 
human  speech  in  Fielding  to  which  the  most  con- 
sistent naturalist  could  add  nothing.  But  that 
fact  was  quite  unknown  in  Berlin  in  the  winter 
of  1887,  when  Arno  Holz  and  Johannes  Schlaf 
withdrew  to  the  frozen  fields  of  a  suburb  and 
founded  a  new  art. 

German  criticism  has  dealt  out  scant  justice  to 
the  major  if  not  the  senior  member  of  this  lit- 
erary firm:  Arno  Holz.  But  German  criticism 
is  at  times  petulant  and  finds  it  hard  to  keep 
its  eye  on  the  object  and  away  from  the  man,  the 
theory  or  the  clique.  It  takes  no  very  deep  in- 
sight to  understand  the  shortcomings  of  Arno 
Holz.  He  is  cocksure,  he  is  truculent,  he  is  al- 
most ignorant.  His  theoretical  writings  make 
one  wonder  how  so  clever  a  man  could  have  writ- 


106          THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

ten  so  foolishly.  But  there  dwells  in  him  a  fresh 
dexterity  of  literary  technique  that  amounts  to 
genius.  There  is  no  species  of  writing  that  he 
has  not  touched;  there  is  none  that  he  has  not 
adorned.  No,  adorned  is  too  cheap  a  word — 
rejuvenated,  rather,  and  created  anew!  He 
snapped  his  fingers  in  the  face  of  many  pompous 
idols  of  the  tribe  and  made  possible  the  modern 
drama. 

The  task  he  set  himself  was  the  representation 
of  life  through  the  authentic  speech  of  men — 
not  speech  rewritten  and  rearranged  in  its  order, 
nor,  above  all,  heard  with  the  merely  literary  in- 
stinct, but  the  humble  speech  of  our  daily  lives 
with  its  elisions,  its  hesitations  and  iterations,  its 
half -articulate  sounds  and  cries,  but  also  with  its 
sting  and  sob  and  clutch.  The  first  experiments 
of  Holz  and  Schlaf  were  sketches  (published  over 
the  Norwegian  pseudonym  of  Bjarne  P.  Holm- 
sen,  in  1889)  in  which  the  new  dialogue  was  sur- 
rounded by  masses  of  rather  thin  narrative.  Al- 
most immediately,  however,  they  eliminated  the 
narrative  portions  and  produced  the  first  con- 
sistently naturalistic  play:  Die  Familie  Selicke 
(1890). 

With  the  perspective  of  nearly  a  quarter  of  a 
century  since  the  first  performance  of  the  playa 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       107 

and  a  fair  knowledge  of  what  has  since  been 
written  in  dramatic  form  in  France,  in  Germany 
and  in  England,  I  agree  unhesitatingly  with 
Arno  Holz's  assertion  that  here  first  and  here  only 
a  new  domain  was  won  for  the  art  of  the  theatre. 
There  is  no  difference  in  kind,  he  rightly  declared, 
between  the  dialogue  of  Schiller  and  the  dialogue 
of  Ibsen.  Both  are  written  literature,  not  speech 
overheard.  I  would  not  imply,  as  Holz  did,  the 
necessary  superiority  of  the  newer  over  the  oldei\ 
art.  But  it  was  new.  No  speech  so  haunting 
in  its  utter  reality  had  ever  appeared — except  iri! 
accidental  fragments — on  the  stage  or  between; 
the  covers  of  a  book.  And  that  speech  bit  itself; 
into  mind  after  mind;  it  gave  the  creative  im- 
pulse to  a  whole  literature  of  uncommon  beautfy 
and  power  and  volume. 

But  Holz  and  Schlaf  did  not  limit  themselves 
to  an  exact  imitation  of  the  elements  of  speech. 
They  also  observed  the  inevitableness  of  its  psy- 
chological succession.  Hence  the  reality  of  their 
dialogue  banished  from  Die  Familie  Selicke  all 
factitious  action.  The  play  is,  in  the  fullest  pos- 
sible sense,  a  piece  of  life  observed  with  stringent 
closeness  and  set  down  with  austere  veracity. 
There  is  but  one  scene  for  the  three  acts,  the  liv- 
ing-room of  poor  people;  the  action  takes  place 


io8  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

5  within  a  few  hours.  The  room  is  sharply  etched 
in  the  stage  directions;  the  people  are  completely 
visualised.  If  you  met  them  on  the  stairs  of  a 
house  in  the  north  of  Berlin,  you  would  recog- 
nise them  at  once — the  father,  the  mother,  the 
two  boys,  the  daughter  and  her  sweetheart.  The 
little  that  happens  is  neither  new  nor  striking. 
Life  and  death  and  love  appear  in  their  imme- 
morial guise.  A  good  deal  of  sordidness,  a  gleam 
of  goodness  and  self-denial,  souls  warped  by  the 
wrongs  of  the  world:  what  more  does  one  want? 

"Sunt  lacrymae  rerum  et  nos  mortalia  tangunt." 

There  are  no  rejected  inheritances  or  sudden  for- 
tunes, as  there  are  even  in  Hervieu;  no  lost  let- 
ters as  in  Pinero  and  Lemaitre;  no  swift  trans- 
formations in  the  hearts  and  fates  of  men.  There 
is,  as  Fromentin  said  of  Rubens,  "no  pomp,  no 
ornament,  no  turbulence,  nor  grace,  nor  fine  cloth- 
ing, nor  one  lovely  and  useless  incident."  There 
is  life. 

"And  life,  some  think,  is  worthy  of  the  Muse." 

It  has  been  said  that  such  art  is  merely  photo- 
graphic. But  the  criticism  is  superficial.  A 
photograph  has  neither  movement  nor  expression  ; 
it  renders  the  mood  of  neither  the  world  nor  the 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       109 

soul ;  there  is  no  laughter  in  it,  no  sob,  no  prayer. 
It  gives  a  single  gesture  transfixed  by  a  mechan- 
ism. It  has  been  said,  too,  that  such  art  lacks 
interpretative  power,  f  But  the  infinite,  as  Goethe 
saw,  lurks  in  the  finite,  if  we  but  pursue  the  finite 
far  enough.  |  To  observe  man  and  his  life  relent- 
lessly, to  set  down  the  results  of  such  observation 
with  complete  sincerity,  is  to  be  sure,  at  last,  to 
come  upon  those  ultimate  mysteries  which  escape 
the  snares  of  circumstance  and  are  free  of  the 
arbitrament  of  mortality.  To  such  an  interpre-^ 
tation  of  the  world  the  finest  validity  belongs. 
To  draw  a  moral,  to  preach  a  doctrine,  is  like 
shouting  at  the  north  star.  Life  is  a  vast  and 
awful  business.  *  The  great  artist  sets  down  his 
vision  of  it  and  is  silent.  •  There  are  neither  so- 
cial panaceas  nor  short  cuts  to  cheerful  living  in 
the  Iliad  or  in  Lear.  Now  it  is  the  merit  of  the 
naturalistic  drama  of  modern  Germany — *pf  the 
drama  of  Hauptmann  and  Halbe,  of  Hirschfeld 
and  Schnitzler- — to  have  set  down  a  vision  of  life 
that  coincides  remarkably  with  the  humble  truth. 
Nothing^that  is  human  has  been  alien  to  its  sight, 
to  its  compassion,  to  its  power  of  representation. 
It  has  grappled  with  reality  on  closer  terms  than 
any  pther  literature  of  which  we  have  knowledge. 
Therein  resides  its  power  and,  I  believe,  its  per- 
manent value.  And  of  this  art  the  theory  and 


ilio          THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

the  first  complete  example  are  due  to  Arno  Holz 
and  Johannes  Schlaf.  Holz  showed  his  sketches 
and  his  play  in  manuscript  to  Gerhart  Haupt- 
mann  before  the  Silesian  dramatist  had  written 
Before  Dawn^  and  Hauptmann  is  the  pre-emi- 
nent master  of  the  modern  German  drama  both 
in  its  naturalistic  and  in  its  neo-romantic  phases. 
Hence,  Die  Familie  Selicke  was  an  artistic 
achievement  of  historic  significance,  and  a  de- 
scription of  it  the  necessary  prologue  to  the  de- 
velopment in  the  art  of  the  theatre  with  which 
this  chapter  deals 

II 

In  one  of  his  rare  fragments  of  lyrical  verse 
Gerhart  Hauptmann  (b.  1862)  has  described, 
with  insight  and  exactness,  his  own  character  as 
a  creative  artist.  "Let  thy  soul,  O  poet,  be  like 
an  ^Eolian  harp,  stirred  by  the  gentlest  breath. 
Eternally  must  its  strings  vibrate  under  the 
breathing  of  the  world's  woe.  For  the  world's 
woe  is  the  root  of  our  heavenward  yearning. 
Thus  will  thy  songs  be  rooted  in  the  world's  woe, 
but  the  heavenly  light  will  shine  upon  their 
crown."  In  this  view,  it  is  clear,  the  artist  is 
essentially  passive.  And  so,  in  fact,  the  natural- 
istic artist  must  be.  He  must  not  break  in  upon 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       111 

the  vision  of  life;  his  imagination  rounds  out  and 
completes;  it  does  not  change  the  reality  which 
experience  furnishes.  But  that  reality — so  sensi- 
tively observed  and  so  greatly  rendered — has  al- 
ways inspired  Hauptmann  with  a  boundless  com- 
passion. To  him  the  world's  life  has  been  the 
world's  woe;  his  very  austerity  and  apparent 
harshness  pay  tribute  to  the  sacredness  of  human 
sorrow.  Such  a  temperament  adopted  the  tech- 
nique of  the  naturalistic  drama  not  only  as  an 
artistic  but  as  an  ethical  act.  It  sought  the 
tragic  beauty  that  is  in  truth  and  almost  instinc- 
tively rejected  all  the  traditional  devices  of 
dramaturgic  technique.  From  such  a  point  of 
view  artifice  is  not  only  futile,  it  is  wrong. 
There  could  be,  in  the  drama  of  Hauptmann^  no 
complicatior^fjplpt,  no  culmination  of  the  re- 
sultant struggle  in  merely  effective  scenes,  no  su- 
perior articulateness  on  the  part  of  the  charac- 
ters. There  could  be  no  artistic  beginning,  for 
life  comes  shadowy  from  life;  there  could  be  no 
artistic  ending,  for  the  play  of  life  ends  only  in 
eternity. 

This  view  of  the  drama's  relation  to  life  leads, 
naturally,  to  the  exclusion  of  many  devices. 
Thus  Hauptmann,  unlike  the  playwrights  of 
France,  but  like  Ibsen  and  Galsworthy,  avoids 


112  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

the  division  of  acts  into  scenes.  The  coming  and 
\  going  of  characters  has  the  unobtrusiveness  but 
seldom  violated  in  life;  the  inevitable  artifice  of 
entrance  and  exit  is  held  within  rigid  bounds.  In 
some  of  his  earlier  dramas  he  also  observed  the 
unities  of  time  and  place,  and  throughout  his 
work  practises  close  economy  in  these  respects. 
It  goes  without  saying  that  he  rejects  the  mono- 
logue, the  unnatural  reading  of  letteFs,  the 
raisoneur  or  commenting  and  providential  char- 
acter, the  lightly  motivised  confession — all  the 
devices  in  brief,  by  which  even  Hervieu  and 
Lemaitre,  Wilde  and  Pinero,  blandly  trans- 
port information  across  the  footlights,  or 
unravel  the  artificial  knot  which  they  have 
tied. 

In  dialogue,  the  medium  of  the  drama,  Haupt- 
mann  adds  to  the  reality  of  Holz  a  complete  ef- 
fortlessness. Hence  beside  the  speech  of  his  char- 
acters all  other  dramatic  speech  seems  conscious 
and  merely  literary.  Nor  is  that  marvellous 
veracity  in  the  handling  of  his  medium  a  mere 
control  of  dialect.  Johannes  Vockerat  and 
Michael  Kramer,  Dr.  Scholz  and  Professor 
Crampton,  speak  with  a  human  raciness  and  na- 
tive truth  not  surpassed  by  the  weavers  or  peas- 
ants of  Silesia.  Hauptmann  has  heard  the  in- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       113 

flections  of  the  human  voice,  the  faltering  and 
fugitive  eloquence  of  the  living  word,  not  only 
with  his  ears  but  with  his  soul. 

External  devices  necessarily  contribute  to  this 
effect.  Thus  Hauptmann  renders  all  dialect 
with  phonetic  accuracy  and  correct  differentia- 
tion. In  Before  Dawn  (1889)  Hoffmann,  Loth,' 
Dr.  Schimmelpfennig  and  Helen  speak  normal 
high  German;  all  the  other  characters  speak  the 
Silesian  except  the  imported  footman  Eduard 
who  uses  the  Berlin  dialect.  In  The  Beaver 
Coat  (1893)  the  various  gradations  of  that  dia- 
lect are  scrupulously  set  down,  from  the  impu- 
dent vulgarity  of  Leontine  and  Adelaide  to  the 
occasional  consonantal  slips  of  Wehrhahn.  The 
egregious  Mrs.  Wolff,  in  the  same  play,  cannot - 
deny  her  Silesian  origin.  Far  finer  shades  of 
character  are  indicated  by  the  amiable  elisions  of 
Mrs.  Vockerat,  Senior,  in  Lonely  Lives  (1891), 
the  recurrent  crassness  of  Mrs.  Scholz  in  The  Re- 
conciliation (1890)  and  the  solemn  reiterations 
of  Michael  Kramer  (1900).  Nor  must  it  be 
thought  that  such  characterisation  has  anything 
in  common  with  the  set  phrases  of  Dickens. 
From  the  richness  and  variety  of  German  col- 
loquial speech,  from  the  deep  brooding  of  the 
German  soul  upon  the  common  things  and  the 


114  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

enduring  emotions  of  life,  Hauptmann  has  caught 
the  authentic  accents  that  change  dramatic  dia- 
logue into  the  speech  of  man. 

In  the  structure  of  his  drama  Hauptmann, 
*again  following  and  surpassing  the  theory  and 
practice  of  Holz,  met  and  solved  an  even  more 
difficult  problem  than  in  the  character  of  his  dia- 
logue. He  rejects  the  whole  tradition  of  struc- 
tural technique.  '  And  he  is  able  to  do  so  by  rea- 
son of  his  intimate  contact  with  the  normal  truth 
of  things.  In  life,  for  instance,  the  conflict  of 
will  with  will,  the  passionate  crises  of  human 
existence,  are  but  rarely  concentrated  into  a  brief 
space  of  time  or  culminate  in  a  highly  salient  sit- 
uation. Long  and  wearing  attrition,  and  crises 
that  are  seen  to  have  been  such  only  in  the  retro- 
spect of  calmer  years,  are  the  rule.  Hence  in- 
stead of  effective  rearrangement  Hauptmann  con- 
tents himself  with  the  austere  simplicity  of  that 
succession  of  action  which  observation  really  af- 
\  fords.  The  intrusion  of  a  new  force  into  a  given 
j  setting,  as  in  Lonely  Lives,  is  as  violent  an  inter- 
ference with  the  sober  course  of  things  as  he  ad- 
mits. From  his  noblest  successes,  The  Weavers 
(1892),  Drayman  Hensckel  (1898),  Michael 
Kramer  (1900),  Rose  Bernd  (1903),  the  arti- 
fice of  complication  is  wholly  absent. 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       115 

It  follows  that  his  fables  are  simple  and  de^J 
void  of  plot,  that  comedy  and  tragedy  must  in- 1 
here  in  character,   and  that  conflict  must  grow 
from  the  clash  of  character  with  environment  or 
of  character  with  character  in  its  totality.     In 
other  words:     Since  the  unwonted  and  adven- 
turous are  rigidly  excluded,  dramatic  complica- 
tion can  but  rarely,  with  Hauptmann,  proceed 
from  action.     For  the  life  of  man  is  woven  of 
"little,  nameless,  unremembered  acts"  which  pos- 
sess no  significance  except  as  they  illustrate  char- 
acter and  thus,  link  by  link,  forge  that  fate  which 
is  identical   with  character.   |The  constant  and 
bitter  conflict  in  the  world  does  not  arise  from 
pointed  and  opposed  notions  of  honour  and  duty 
held  at  some  rare  climacteric  moment,  but  from  . 
the  far  more  tragic  grinding  of  a  hostile  environ-  I 
ment  upon  man  or  of  the  imprisonment  of  alien 
souls  in  the  cage  of  some  social  bondage. 

These  two  motives,  appearing  sometimes  sin- 
gly,   sometimes    blended,    are    fundamental    to 
Hauptmann's  work.     In  The  Reconciliation  an     — " 
unnatural  marriage  has  brought  discord  and  de- 
pravity upon  earth ;  in  Lonely  Lives  a  seeker  after    r  ! 
truth  is   throttled  by   a  murky  world;  in   The 
Weavers  the  whole  organisation  of  society  drives 
men  to  tragic  despair;  in  The  Beaver  Coat  the 


ii6  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

motive  is  ironically  inverted  and  a  base  shrewd- 
ness triumphs  over  the  social  machine;  in  Rose 
Bernd   traditional   righteousness   hounds   a  pure 
spirit   out   of   life;    and    in    Gabriel   Schilling's 
Flight  (written  in  1906)  Hauptmann  returns  to 
a  favourite  motive:  Woman,  strong  through  the 
'  \  narrowness  and  intensity  of  her  elemental  aims 
\  destroying  man,  the  thinker  and  dreamer  whose 
'.will,    dissipated   in   an  hundred   ideal   purposes, 
j^-'goes  under  in  the  unequal  struggle.  y 

The  fable  and  structure  of  Michael  Kramer 
well  illustrate  Hauptmann's  typical  themes  and 
i  ^  i  jnethods.  The  whole  of  the  first  act  is  exposi- 
,i**  L  tibn.  It  is  not,  however,,  the  exposition  of  ante- 
cedent actions  or  events.  It  is  wholly  of  char- 
acter. The  conditions  of  the  play  are  entirely 
static.  Kramer's  greatness  of  soul  broods  over 
the  whole  act  from  which  his  person  is  absent. 
Mrs.  Kramer,  the  narrow-minded,  nagging  wife, 
and  Arnold,  the  homely,  wretched  boy  with  a 
spark  of  genius,  quail  under  that  spirit.  Michal- 
ine,  the  brave,  whole-hearted  girl,  stands  among 
these,  pitying  and  comprehending  all.  In  the 
second  act  one  of  Arnold's  sordid  and  piteous  mis- 
takes comes  to  light.  An  innkeeper's  daughter 
complains  to  Kramer  of  his  son's  grotesque  and 
annoyingly  expressed  passion  for  her.  Kramer 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       117 

takes  his  son  to  task  and,  in  one  of  the  noblest 
scenes  in  the  modern  drama,  wrestles  with  the 
boy's  soul.  In  the  third  act  the  inn  is  shown. 
Its  rowdy,  semi-educated  habitues  deride  Arnold 
with  coarse  gibes.  He  cannot  tear  himself  away. 
Madly  sensitive  and  conscious  of  his  final  su- 
periority over  a  world  that  crushes  him  by  its 
merely  brutal  advantages,  he  is  goaded  to  de- 
struction. In  the  last  act,  in  the  presence  of  his 
dead  son,  Michael  Kramer  cries  out  after  some 
reconciliation  with  the  silent  universe.  The  play 
is  done  and  nothing  has  happened.  The  only  ac- 
tion is  Arnold's  suicide  and  that  action  has  no. 
dramatic  value.  The  significance  of  the  play 
lies  in  the  unequal  marriage  between  Kramer  and  ~ 
his  wife,  in  Arnold's  character — in  the  fact  that  "* 
such  things  are,  and  that  in  our  outlook  upon  the  / 

•\TTr»/^l<a     f\4-      IITA     trro     TYI  1 1 0  4-     i*c*r*\r-/~\i-\     TTTi'f-ri      f-  r»  orvi 


whole  of  life  we  must  reckon  with  them. 

Hauptmann's  simple  management  of  a  preg-/l*.U'  u 
nant  fable  may  be  admirably  observed,  finally,    /t\L 
by  comparing    "Lonely  Lives   and  Rosmersholm  ^ 
(1886).     Hauptmann     was     undoubtedly     in-  ^ 
debted  to  Ibsen  for  his  problem  and  for  the  main  V 
elements  of  the  story :    A  modern  thinker  is  over- 
come  by  the  orthodox  and  conservative  world  in 
which  he  lives.     And  that  world  conquers  largely  x 
because  he  cannot  be  united  to  the  woman  who 


ii8  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

(is  his  inspiration  and  his  strength.  In  handling 
this  fable  two  difficult  questions  were  to  be  an- 
swered by  the  craftsman:  By  what  means  does 
the  hostile  environment  crush  the  protagonist? 
Why  cannot  he  take  the  saving  hand  that  is  held 
out  to  him?  Ibsen  practically  shirks  the  answer 
to  the  first  question.  For  it  is  not  the  bitter 
zealot  Kroll,  despite  his  newspaper  war  and  his 
scandal-mongering,  who  breaks  Rosmer's  strength. 
It  is  fate,  fate  in  the  dark  and  ancient  sense. 
"The  dead  cling  to  Rosmersholm" — that  is  the 
key-note  of  the  play.  The  answer  to  the  second 
question  is  interwoven  with  an  attempt  to  ra- 
tionalise the  fatality  that  broods  over  Rosmers- 
holm. The  dead  cling  to  it  because  a  subtle  and 
nameless  wrong  has  been  committed  against 
them.  And  that  sin  has  been  committed  by  the 
woman  who  could  save  Rosmer.  At  the  end  of 
the  second  act  Rebecca  refuses  to  be  his  wife.  The 
reason  for  that  refusal,  dimly  prefigured,  ab- 
sorbs his  thoughts,  and  through  two  acts  of  con- 
summate dramaturgic  suspense  the  sombre  history 
is  gradually  unfolded.  And  no  vague  phrases 
concerning  the  ennobling  of  humanity  can  con- 
ceal the  central  fact:  the  play  derives  its  power 
from  a  traditional  plot  and  a  conventional  mo- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       119 

tive — crime  and  its  discovery,  sin  and  its  retri- 
bution. 

In  Lonely  Lives  the  two  questions  apparently 
treated  in  Rosmersholm  are  answered,  not  in  the 
terms  of  effective  dramaturgy,  but  of  life  itself. 
Johannes  Vockerat  lives  in  the  midst  of  the 
world  that  must  undo  him,  subtly  irritated  by  all 
to  which  his  heart  clings.  Out  of  that  world  he 
has  grown  and  he  cannot  liberate  himself  from 
it.  His  good  wife  and  his  admirable  parents  are 
bound  to  the  conventional  in  no  base  or  fanatical 
sense.  He  dare  scarcely  tell  them  that  their  pre- 
occupations, that  their  very  love,  slays  the  ideal 
in  his  soul.  And  so  the  pitiless  attrition  goes 
on.  There  is  no  action:  there  is  being.  The 
struggle  is  rooted  in  the  deep  divisions  of  men's 
souls,  not  in  unwonted  crime  and  plotting.  And 
Anna  Mahr,  the  free  woman  of  a  freer  world, 
parts  from  Johannes  because  she  recognises  their 
human  unfitness  to  take  up  the  burden  of  tragic 
sorrow  which  any  union  between  them  must  cre- 
ate. The  time  for  such  things  has  not  come  and 
may  never  come.  Thus  Johannes  is  left  deso- 
late, powerless  to  face  the  unendurable  emptiness 
and  decay  that  lie  before  him,  destroyed  by  the 
conflicting  loyalties  to  personal  and  ideal  ends 


120  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

which  are  fundamental  to  the  life  of  creative 
thought. 

Drama,  then,  which  relies  so  little  upon  ex- 
ternal action,  but  finds  action  rather  in  "every 
inner  conflict  of  passions,  every  consequence  of 
diverging  thoughts"  must  stress  the  obscurest  ex- 
pression of  such  passions  and  such  thoughts. 
Since  its  fables,  furthermore,  are  to  arise  from  the 
immediate  data  of  life,  it  must  equally  empha- 
sise the  significant  factor  of  those  common  things 
amid  which  man  passes  his  struggle.  And  so  the 
naturalistic  drama  of  Hauptmann  and  his  school 
was  forced  to  introduce  elements  of  description 
and  exposition  usually  held  alien  to  the  genre. 
Briefly,  it  has  dealt  largely  and  powerfully  with 
atmosphere,  environment  and  gesture;  it  has  ex- 
panded and  refined  the  stage-direction  beyond  all 
precedent  and  made  of  it  an  important  element 
of  dramatic  art. 

The  playwrights  of  the  middle  of  the  last  cen- 
tury who  made  an  effort  to  lead  the  drama  back 
to  reality,  knew  nothing  of  this  element.  Nor 
have  the  masters  of  the  contemporary  stage  in 
France  adopted  it.  Augier  does  not  even  sus- 
pect its  existence;  in  Robertson  it  is  a  matter  of 
"properties"  and  "business."  Any  appearance  of 
this  kind  Hauptmann  avoids  as  do,  after  him, 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       121 

Shaw    and    Galsworthy    and    Granville   Barker. 
The  play  is  not  to  remind  us  of  the  stage,  but  of  /\ ' 
life.     A  difference  in  vision  and  method  difficult 
to  estimate  divides  Robertson's  direction:    "Sam. 
(astonished    L.    corner)"    from    Hauptmann's: 
"Mrs.  John  rises  mechanically  and  cuts  a  slice 
from  a  loaf  of  bread  as  though  under  the  influ- 
ence   of    suggestion."     Robertson    indicates    the 
conventionalised  gesture  of  life;  Hauptmann,  its  /\ 
moral  and  spiritual  density. 

The  descriptive  stage  direction,  effectively  used 
by  Ibsen,  is  further  expanded  by  Hauptmann. 
But  it  remains  impersonal  and  never  becomes  di- 
rect comment  or  even  argument  as  in  Shaw.     It   ^ 
is  used  not  only  to  suggest  the  scene  but,  above__ 
all,  its  atmosphere,  its  mood.     Through  it  Haupt-   / 
mann  shows  his  keen  sense  of  the  interaction  be- 
tween man  and  his  world  and  the  high  moral 
expressiveness  of  common  things.     To  define  the      * 
mood  more  clearly  he  describes  the  hour  and  the  * 
weather.     The  action  of  Rose  Bernd  opens  on  a 
bright  Sunday  morning  in  May;  that  of  Dray- 
man Henschel  during  a  bleak  February  dawn. 
The  desperate  souls  in  The  Reconciliation  meet 
on  a  snow-svept  Christmas  eve;  the  sun  has  just 
set  over  the  lake  in  which  Johannes  Vockerat  at 
last  finds  rest.     In  these  indications  Hauptmann 


122  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

rarely  aims  at  either  irony  or  symbolism.  He  is 
guided  by  a  sense  for  the  probabilities  of  life 
which  he  expresses  through  such  interactions  be- 
tween the  moods  of  man  and  nature  as  experience 
seems  to  offer.  Only  in  The  Maidens  of  the 
Mount  has  the  suave  autumnal  weather  a  deeper 
meaning,  for  it  was  clearly  Hauptmann's  pur- 
pose in  this  play 

"To  build  a  shadowy  isle  of  bliss 
Midmost  the  beating  of  the  steely  sea." 

Hauptmann  has  also  become  increasingly  ex- 
acting in  the  demand  that  the  actor  simulate  the 
personal  appearance  of  his  characters  as  they 
arose  in  his  imagination,  and  has  visualised  their 
minutest  gestures  with  remarkable  concreteness. 
His  directions  often  tax  the  mimetic  art  of  the 
stage  to  the  very  verge  of  its  power.  By  means 
of  them,  however,  he  has  placed  within  narrow 
limits  the  activity  of  stage-manager  and  actor. 
They  are  not  his  collaborators;  they  are  his  in- 
terpreters merely.  He  alone  is  the  creator  of 
his  drama,  and  no  alien  factitiousness  is  allowed 
to  obscure  its  final  aim — the  creation  of  living 
men. 

In  the  third  act  of  The  Rats  (1911)  the  ex- 
stage-manager  Hassenreuter  is  drawn  by  his 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       123 

pupil,  young  Spitta,  into  an  argument  concern- 
ing the  nature  of  tragedy.  "Of  the  heights  of 
humanity  you  know  nothing,"  Hassenreuter 
hotly  declares.  "You  asserted  the  other  day  that 
in  certain  circumstances  a  barber  or  a  scrubwoman 
could  as  fitly  be  the  subject  of  tragedy  as  Lady 
Macbeth  or  King  Lear."  To  which  Spitta 
calmly  replies:  "Before  art,  as  before  the  law, 
all  men  are  equal."  From  this  doctrine  Haupt- 
mann  has  never  departed,  although  his  interpre- 
tation of  it  has  never  been  fanatical.  Through- 
out his  work,  however,  there  is  a  careful  disre- 
gard of  several  classes  of  his  countrymen :  the  no- 
bility, the  bureaucracy  (with  the  notable  excep- 
tion of  Wehrhahn  in  The  Beaver  Coat),  the  capi- 
talists. He  has  devoted  himself  in  his  naturalis- 
tic plays  to  the  life  of  the  common  people,  of  the 
middle  classes  and  of  creative  thinkers. 

The  delineation  of  all  these  characters  has  two  , 
constant  qualities :  objectivity  and  justice.  The  au- 
thor has  not  merged  the  sharp  outlines  of  human- 
ity into  the  background  of  his  own  idiosyncrasy. 
These  men  and  women  are  themselves.  No  trick 
of  speech,  no  lurking  similarity  of  thought,  unites 
them  to  each  other  or  to  the  mind  that  shaped 
them.  The  nearer  any  two  of  them  tend  to  ap- 
proach a  recognisable  type,  the  more  magnificently 


124  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

is    die    individuality    of   each    vindicated.     The 
t  elderly  middle-class  woman,  harassed  by  ignoble 
cares  ignobly  borne,  driven  by  a  lack  of  fortitude 
into  querulousness,  and  into  injustice  by  the  self- 
ishness of  her  affections,  is  illustrated  both  by 
Mrs.  Scholz  and  Mrs.  Kramer.     But,  in  the  for- 
|     mer,    bodily   suffering   and  nervous   terror  have 
,     slackened  the  moral  fibre,  and  this  abnormality 
speaks  through  every  word  and  gesture.     Mrs. 
Kramer  is  simply  average,  with  the  tenacity  and 
the  corroding  power  of  the  average. 

Another  noteworthy  group  is  that  of  the  three 
Lutheran  clergymen :  Kolin  in  Lonely  Lives,  Kit- 
telhaus  in  The  Weavers,  and  Spitta,  Senior,  in 
The  Rats.  Kolin  has  the  utter  sincerity  which 
can  afford  to  be  trivial  and  not  cease  to  be  lov- 
able ;  Kittelhaus  is  the  conscious  time-server  whose 
opinions  might  be  anything;  Spitta  struggles  for 
his  official  convictions,  half  blinded  by  the  allure- 
ments of  a  world  which  it  is  his  duty  to  denounce. 
Each  is  wholly  himself;  no  hint  of  critical  irony 
defaces  his  character;  and  thus  each  is  able,  im- 
plicitly, to  put  his  case  with  the  power  inherent 
in  the  genuinely  and  recognisably  human.  From 
the  same  class  of  temperaments — one  that  he  does 
not  love — Hauptmann  has  had  the  justice  to 
draw  two  characters  of  basic  importance  in 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       125 

Lonely  Lives.     The  elder  Vockerats  are  exces-    \ 
sively  limited  in  their  outlook  on  life.     It  is,  in- 
deed, in  its  time  and  place,  an  impossible  out- 
look.    These  two  people  have  nothing  to  recom-     ! 
mend  them  save  their  goodness,  but  it  is  a  good- 
ness so  keenly  felt,  so  radiantly  human,  that  the 
conflict  of  the  play  is  deepened  and  complicated 
by  the  question  whether  the  real  tragedy  be  not 
the  pain  endured  by  these  kindly  hearts,  rather 
than  the  destruction  of  their  more  arduous  son. 

All  these  may  be  said  to  be  minor  characters. 
Some  of  them  are,  in  that  they  scarcely  affect  the 
fable  involved.  But  in  no  other  sense  are  there 
minor  figures  in  Hauptmann's  plays.  A  few  / 
lines  suffice,  and  a  human  being  stands  squarely 
upon  the  living  earth,  with  all  his  mortal  per- 
plexities in  his  words  and  voice.  Such  charac- 
ters affc'the  tutor  Weinhold  in  The  Weavers  ^  the 
painter  Lachmann  in  Michael  Kramer,  Dr.  Boxer 
in  The  Conflagration  (1901)  and  Dr.  Schim- 
melpfennig  in  Before  Dawn. 

In  his  artists  and  thinkers  Hauptmann  has  il- 
lustrated  the  excessive  nervousness  of  the  age. 
Michael  Kramer  rises  above  it;  Johannes  Vock- 
erat  and  Gabriel  Schilling  succumb.  And  beside  , 
these  men  there  usually  arises  the  sharply  real-' 
.ised  figure  of  ""the  destroying"~woman — innocent 


126  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

and  helpless  in  Kathe  Vockerat,  trivial  and  ob- 
tuse in  Alwine  Lachmann,  or  impelled  by  a  de- 
vouring sexual  egotism  in  Eveline  Schilling  and 
Hanna  Elias. 

Hauptmann's  creative  power  culminates,  how- 
ever, as  he  approaches  the  common  folk.  These 
are  of  two  kinds:  the  Berlin  populace  and  the 
Silesian  peasantry.  The  world  of  the  former  in 
all  its  shrewdness,  impudence  and  varied  lusts, 
he  has  set  down  with  cruel  and  quiet  exactness 
in  The  Beaver  Coat  and  The  Conflagration. 
Mrs.  Wolff,  the  protagonist  of  both  plays,  rises 
into  a  figure  of  epic  breadth — a  sordid  and  finally 
almost  tragic  embodiment  of  worldliness  and 
cunning.  When  he  approaches  the  peasants  of 
his  own  countryside  his  touch  is  less  hard,  his 
method  not  quite  so  remorseless.  And  thus,  per- 
haps, it  comes  about,  that  in  the  face  of  these 
characters  the  art  of  criticism  can  only  set  down 
a  confirmatory:  'They  are!"  Old  Deans  in  The 
Heart  of  Midlothian,  Tulliver  and  the  Dodson 
sisters  in  The  Mill  on  the  Floss,  illustrate  the  na- 
ture of  Hauptmann's  incomparable  projection  of 
simple  men  and  women.  Here,  in  Dryden's 
phrase,  is  God's  plenty.  The  morose  jpathos  of 
Beipst  (Before  Dawn} ;  th£  Vanity  and  faithful- 
ness of  Friebe  (The  Reconciliation}:,  the  sad 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       127 

fatalism  of  Hauffe  (Drayman  Henschel} ;  the  in- 
stinctive kindliness  of  the  nurse  and  the  hu- 
morous fortitude  of  Mrs.  Lehmann  (Lonely 
Lives) ;  the  vulgar  good  nature  of  Liese  Bansch 
(Michael  Kramer} ;  the  trivial  despair  of  Pauline 
and  the  primitive  passion  of  Mrs.  John  (The 
Rats} ;  the  massive  greatness  of  old  Hilse's  rock- 
like  patience  and  the  sudden  impassioned  pro- 
test of  Luise  (The  Weavers} ;  the  deep  trouble 
of  Henschel's  simple  soul  and  the  hunted  purity 
of  Rose  Bernd — these  qualities  and  these  char- 
acters transcend  the  convincingness  of  mere  art. 
Like  the  rain-drenched  mould,  the  black  trees 
against  the  sky,  the  noise  of  the  earth's  waters, 
they  are  among  the  abiding  elements  of  a  native 
and  familiar  world.  ^ 

X  Such  is  the  naturalistic  drama  of  Hauptmann.  1 
By  employing  the  real  speech  of  man,  by  em- 
phasising being  rather  than  action,  by  creating 
the  very  atmosphere  and  gesture  of  life,  it  suc- 
ceeds in  presenting  characters  whose  vital  truth 
achieves  the  intellectual  beauty  and  moral  en- 
ergy of  great  art.  I  can  not  sum  up  his  work  in 
its  totality  here.  For  Hauptmann  is  also  a  poet 
and  thus  the  most  distinguished  figure  in  the  neo- 
romantic  movement  in  Germany.  But  by  his 
work  as  a  naturalist  he  has  not  only  created  a 


128  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

new  art;  he  has  added  unforgettable  figures  to 
the  world  of  the  imagination — figures  that  ally 
him  to  the  great  projectors  of  human  character, 
to  Fielding,  to  Thackeray,  to  Flaubert. 

Ill 

The  very  year  (1889)  in  which  Hauptmann 
inaugurated  his  great  career  with  Before  Dawn, 
the  Lessing  Theatre  in  Berlin  achieved  one  of  the 
most  striking  successes  of  the  century  with  a  play 
called  Die  Ehre.  Its  author  was  the  East  Prus- 
sian novelist,  Hermann  Sudermann  (b.  1857) 
whose  name,  almost  obscure  until  then,  was  soon 
to  be  known  more  widely  than  any  German 
dramatist's  since  Kotzebue.  His  enemies  have 
not  spared  him  the  withering  comparison.  For 
it  is  a  notable  fact  that  Sudermann  whose  work 
is  often,  in  England  and  America,  coupled  with 
Hauptmann's,  is  almost  totally  discredited  as  a 
playwright  in  Germany  and  is  frankly  assigned, 
in  most  serious  criticism,  a  station  among  the 
mere  commercial  purveyors  to  the  popular  stage. 
The  naturalists,  led  by  Hauptmann,  have  intro- 
duced into  the  German  drama  ideals  of  un- 
equalled stringency.  No  theatrical  unveracity  in 
the  dramatic  treatment  of  life  is  tolerated  by  Ger- 
man criticism;  no  calculated  concession  to  the 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       129 

mob  is  pardoned.  The  commercial  theatre  and 
the  art  of  the  drama  are  rigidly  kept  apart. 
Hence  no  voice  has,  for  some  years,  been  raised 
for  Sudermann.  A  criticism  that  detects  a  touch 
of  artifice  in  Rose  Bernd  is  not  likely  to  be  lenient 
toward  the  author  of  Heimat  (1893)  or  Es  lebe 
das  Leben  (1902). 

But  if  the  foreign  critic  represents  a  kind  of 
contemporaneous  posterity,  it  is  possible  to  take 
a  far  more  moderate  view  of  Sudermann's  activ- 
ity as  dramatist.  He  has  undoubtedly  retained, 
in  many  of  his  plays,  the  technique  of  Dumas 
fils  and  his  contemporaries.  His  exposition  is 
often  shamelessly  mechanical,  his  management  of 
the  fable  adjusted  not  to  the  necessities  of  the 
situation  but  to  the  fancy  of  the  audience;  he 
uses  the  providential  character — that  French 
deus  ex  machina — and  does  not  shrink  from 
wrenching  the  whole  nature  of  man  for  the  sake 
of  an  effective  curtain.  On  the  other  hand  it  can 
be  said  that  in  many  of  his  plays  these  artifices 
are  much  softened.  They  have  been  a  tempta- 
tion to  his  feverishly  restless  temperament,  but  a 
temptation  to  which  he  has  not  always  yielded. 
Nor  must  it  be  forgotten  that  into  this  discredited 
and  rightly  discredited  mechanism  of  the  stage 
he  has  almost  always  infused  a  probity  of  ob- 


130  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

servation  and  a  power  of  shaping  character  which 
are  akin  to  the  same  qualities  in  his  greater  and 
more  self-denying  contemporaries.  Even  from 
amid  the  wretched  clap-trap — the  unnatural  an- 
titheses, the  cheap  coincidences,  the  sudden  for- 
tunes— of  his  first  play  arose  the  memorable  char- 
acter of  Alma  Heinecke,  that  matchless  daughter 
of  the  Berlin  poor  who  presents  her  case  with 
inimitable  raciness  and  truth. 

Neither  in  his  next  play,  Sodoms  Ende 
(1890),  nor  in  Heimat  (1893),  to  which  a  grate- 
ful role  has  given  international  notoriety,  nor  in 
his  later  and  lurid  pictures  of  Berlin  society,  Es 
lebe  das  Leben  (1902),  Das  Blumenboot  (1906), 
Der  gute  Ruf  (1912),  is  the  best  of  Sudermann 
to  be  found.  That  best  must  be  sought  in  an 
occasional  comedy,  and  in  many  passages  of  those 
plays  in  which  he  draws  sincerity  and  strength 
from  his  native  earth — the  bleak  and  storied  shores 
of  the  Baltic  Sea. 

The  happiest  of  the  comedies  is  Die  Schmet- 
terlingsschlacht  (1894).  The  protagonist  of  the 
play  is  Frau  Hergentheim,  the  widow  of  a  small 
government  official.  Her  pension  is  ridiculous 
and  she  has  three  daughters  whom  she  wishes  to 
bring  up  properly  and  marry  well.  But  bread 
is  dear  and  so  is  oleomargarine,  as  she  explains 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       131 

in  her  admirable  defence  in  the  last  act,  and  hun- 
ger is  painful.  There  was  a  time,  furthermore, 
when  the  children  were  small.  And  even  now 
their  ladylike  earnings  are  wretched  enough. 
But  through  hunger  and  humiliation  Frau  Her- 
gentheim  has  held  fast  to  her  ideal — the  only  one 
she  knows — not  to  let  her  daughters  lapse  into 
an  inferior  social  class.  Her  reward  comes  to 
her,  but  not  until  she  has  suffered  all  the  bitter- 
ness which  the  situation  holds.  Beneath  its  light- 
ness of  mood  the  play  is  a  serious  and  arresting 
study,  expressed  through  living  characters,  of  that 
Moloch  of  the  lower  middle-classes — respectabil- 
ity. 

Sudermann's  work,  during  the  following  six 
years,  showed  constant  uncertainty  and  falseness. 
Only  Fritzchen  in  Morituri  (1896),  a  one-act 
tragedy  of  complete  inevitableness  rises  above  the 
glare  and  strain  of  his  efforts.  That  better  self 
of  his  which  has  never  been  quite  blunted  by  haste 
and  success  reasserts  itself  in  Johannisfeuer 
(1900).  The  scene  of  the  play  is  once  more 
Sudermann's  homeland  and  one  has  a  strong  sense 
of  the  presence  of  the  strange  and  ancient  wild- 
ness  of  the  Lithuanian  country-side.  There  are 
coincidences,  no  doubt,  and  the  dialogue  is 
often  enough  pitched  in  a  false  and  theatrical  key 


132  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

— though  never  in  a  falser  key  than  would  be 
held  quite  tolerable  in  Lavedan  or  Hervieu,  in 
Jones  and  Pinero.  But  the  reality  of  Georg  and 
Marikke's  tragic  love  is  profoundly  brought  home 
to  us,  and  Vogelreuter  and  Haffke  are  of  a  fine 
and  true  humanity. 

Berlin,  the  evil  genius  of  his  art,  drew  him  once 
more  (Es  lebe  das  Leben}.  But  in  the  very  next 
year  (1903)  appeared  the  East  Prussian  comedy, 
Der  Sturmgeselle  Sokrates.  The  discussion  of 
burning  political  and  racial  issues  has  served  to 
obscure  the  value  of  this  excellent  play.  Nor 
has  the  truth  been  admitted  that  Sudermann 
stands  above  these  issues  in  an  attitude  of  kindly 
and  philosophic  humanity.  The  very  temperate 
satire  of  the  play  is  directed  against  a  group  of 
elderly  men,  democratic  idealists  of  1848,  whose 
occupation  was  taken  from  them  and  whose  hopes 
were  shattered  by  Bismarck  and  the  establishment 
of  the  empire.  Their  cause  is  lost.  But  Hart- 
meyer,  a  born  fanatic,  will  not  admit  it.  He 
continues  the  secret  society  of  the  years  of  the 
revolution  and  carries  with  him,  by  main  force, 
his  old  cronies,  the  grocer,  the  schoolmaster  and 
the  rabbi.  A  tragic  awakening  comes  to  him 
when  he  desires  to  initiate  his  sons  and  the  son 
of  his  friend  into  the  sacred  mysteries  of  his  old 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       133 

political  dreams.  For  to  these  youths  the  new 
order  is  a  fact  and  an  experience.  Of  Hart- 
meyer's  older  son  Fritz  it  has  made  a  socialist; 
of  Reinhold,  the  younger,  a  chauvinist  and  a 
snob;  the  brilliant  son  of  the  rabbi  explains  to 
his  father  the  harsh  realities  of  social  and  pro- 
fessional discrimination  which,  under  the  empire, 
are  still  the  portion  of  the  Jew.  Hartmeyer  is, 
to  be  sure,  won  over  in  the  end.  But  I  detect  in 
Sudermann' s  final  attitude  a  shadow  of  sympathy 
at  least  for  the  old  democratic  ideals  which  the 
Prussian  regime  has  subordinated  to  the  state's 
welfare.  The  character  work  in  the  play  is  ad- 
mirable, from  the  delightful  rabbi  to  the  girl  at 
the  inn  which  was,  for  so  long,  the  meeting  place 
of  "the  companions  of  the  storm." 

Since  the  appearance  of  Der  Sturmgeselle 
Sokrates  Sudermann  has  experimented  variously. 
Stein  unter  Steinen  (1905)  is  a  sociological  play 
with  a  dash  of  unreal  sentiment;  Das  Blumen- 
boot  and  Der  gute  Ruf,  excursions  into  the  fever- 
ish life  of  the  West  End  of  Berlin  as  Sudermann 
sees  it.  Aside  from  all  these  plays  stands  Strand- 
kinder  (1909),  a  tale  of  the  barbaric  North  dur- 
ing the  Middle  Ages  when  the  Teutonic  knights 
sought  to  subdue  the  fierce  Vikings  of  the  Baltic 
litoral.  Here,  as  elsewhere,  Sudermann  mistakes 


134  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

luridness  for  power,  but  there  resounds  through 
the  play  the  crying  of  wild  souls,  the  beat  of  icy 
surges,  the  desperate  struggle  of  an  heroic  Ger- 
manic folk  over  whom  is  flung  the  snare  of  an 
alien  civilisation.  A  faint,  far  echo  of  that  for- 
gotten strength  of  his  ancestors  still  lives,  at 
times,  in  Sudermann  himself.  He  has  never  be- 
come utterly  subdued  to  the  corruptions  that  al- 
lure him.  Although  his  is  no  free  creation  spirit, 
he  has  succeeded,  again  and  again,  in  projecting 
characters  or  suggesting  an  atmosphere  which,  in 
any  country  but  his  own,  would  have  placed  him 
in  the  front  rank  of  modern  dramatists.  If 
he  has  sunk  to  the  level  of  Lavedan  and  Pinero 
at  their  worst,  if  he  has  equalled  the  violence  of 
Le  Duel  and  the  crass  bidding  for  popularity  of 
The  "Mind  the  Paint"  Girl  (1912),  he  has 
also  created  figures  and  written  scenes  which 
neither  his  French  nor  his  English  contemporary 
have  equalled  in  reality  or  imaginative  power. 
Of  so  much  praise  only  an  untenable  severity  of 
judgment  or  the  personal  animosity  of  the  Ber- 
lin press  can  ever  rob  him. 

IV 

The  remarkable  external  successes  of  Suder- 
mann   did    nothing    to    impede    the    naturalistic 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       135 

movement  in  the  art  of  the  drama.  Hauptmann,  its 
master  spirit,  illustrated  its  possibilities  and  broad- 
ened its  application  year  by  year.  In  1890  ap- 
peared The  Reconciliation,  in  1891,  Lonely  Lives.  , 
In  1892  he  created  the  naturalistic  folk-tragedy 
in  The  Weavers,  in  1893,  the  naturalistic  comedy 
in  The  Beaver  Coat.  In  each  of  these  years  the 
art  of  naturalistic  dramaturgy  gained  new  re- 
cruits. The  year  1890  saw  Ludwig  Fulda's  so- 
cial drama,  Das  verlorene  Paradis,  1891,  his  vig- 
orous and  telling  Die  Sklavin.  In  the  same  year 
Arthur  Schnitzler  began  his  career  as  a  dramatist 
— surpassed  by  Hauptmann  and  by  Hauptmann 
only — with  Das  Mdrchen.  In  1892  appeared 
the  best  play  of  Johannes  Schlaf,  Meister  Oelze, 
as  well  as  the  first  mature  plays  of  Max  Dreyer, 
perhaps  the  weakest  of  the  group  (Dm),  and  of 
the  superbly  gifted  Otto  Erich  Hartleben  (Hanna 
Jagert}.  The  year  1893  finally  saw  Max 
Halbe's  Jugend,  Georg  Hirschfeld's  Zu  Hause 
and  Ernst  Rosmer's  (Frau  Else  Bernstein)  Dam- 
merung.  Thus  the  tale  of  eminent  names  was 
rapidly  completed  and  the  forms  of  the  natural- 
istic drama  definitely  fixed.  Of  these  play- 
wrights one,  Ludwig  Fulda,  abandoned  natural- 
ism; Hartleben  and  Schnitzler  informed  the 
genre  with  the  force  of  their  high  originality;  the 


136          THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

delicate  gifts  of  Frau  Bernstein  found  a  happier 
employment  in  other  fields.  Hence  the  immedi- 
ate school  of  consistent  naturalism  and  of  Haupt- 
mann  is  represented  by  Max  Halbe,  Max  Dreyer, 
and  Georg  Hirschfeld. 

Max  Halbe  (b.  1865)  is  a  native  of  West 
Prussia.  His  deepest  feelings  are  his  love  for 
his  homeland — the  half  Slavic  shores  of  the  Vis- 
tula— and  his  poignant  regret  and  desiderium  for 
the  mad  sweetness  of  youth.  These  emotions  he 
has  dramatised  in  plays  that  are  almost  if  not 
quite  great.  His  imitations  of  Ibsen,  his  dealings 
with  a  more  or  less  bohemian  Berlin  life  are  neg- 
ligible. 

It  is  difficult  to  convey  a  sense  of  the  quality 
of  Jugend  (1893),  Halbe's  best  play  and  one  of 
the  memorable  achievements  of  the  modern 
drama.  The  fable  amounts  to  very  little.  An 
excellent  elderly  West  Prussian  priest,  Hoppe, 
supports  his  orphaned  niece  Annchen,  aged  eight- 
een, and  her  imbecile  half-brother  Amandus. 
Into  this  house  comes  for  a  brief  visit — on  his 
way  from  the  gymnasium  to  a  South  German 
university — a  young  cousin  of  the  girl's  own  age, 
Hans  Hartwig.  The  boy  and  girl  have  not  seen 
each  other  for  years;  Annchen  has  had  priests 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       137 

for  her  only  companions;  Hans  has  been  under 
the  strict  discipline  of  the  German  school.  The 
heady  sweetness  of  spring  sheds  poetry  and  grace 
over  their  suddenly  imperious  instincts.  Almost 
before  the  young  people  are  aware,  the  irreparable 
has  happened.  A  shot  from  Amandus,  meant 
for  Hans,  strikes  Annchen  and  brings  the  play  to 
a  fortuitous  close.  What  glorifies  the  play,  for 
I  can  use  no  lesser  word,  is  the  exquisite  picture 
of  young  love,  consciously  touched  with  tragedy, 
but  irresistible,  the  loveliness  of  a  sane  instinct 
unblunted,  unvitiated  by  the  wrongs,  the  sins, 
the  violences  of  life.  Thus  love  may  have  come 
and  almost  thus  been  tasted  in  some  morning  of 
the  world.  Yet  the  reality  of  the  scene  and  of 
the  passion  is  complete.  For  a  few  days  these 
two  young  creatures  forget  society,  or  strive  to 
forget  it:  Hans,  his  necessary  career,  Annchen, 
her  social  asset  of  chastity.  That  is  all.  Any 
other  way  of  ending  the  play  would  have  served 
equally  well.  The  lyric  cry  that  may  be  at  the 
heart  of  the  homeliest  reality,  the  hymn  of  love 
that  may  be  heard  by  the  simplest  souls,  has  been 
uttered. 

Those  two  young  lovers  reappear  in  Mutter 
Erde  (1897).  But  Paul  Wergenthin  and  An- 
toinette had  the  self-restraint  of  their  finer  na- 


138  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

tures.  So  life  divides  them  and  Paul  goes  to 
Berlin,  marries  a  rather  unsexed  feminist,  and 
seems  lost  to  his  youth  and  his  deeper  self.  But 
his  father's  death  recalls  him  home  to  the  bleak 
land  and  snowy  forests  of  other  days.  Here,  at 
the  cradle  of  his  race,  near  the  great  heart  of  his 
mother  earth,  the  falseness  and  hollowness  of  his 
Berlin  life  becomes  clear  to  him.  His  feminist 
wife,  an  uprooted  social  vagrant,  has  only  a  sneer 
for  ancestral  traditions,  the  fundamental  human 
sanctities  that  are  revived  in  Paul's  heart.  He 
meets  his  old  sweetheart.  They  are  both  bound 
beyond  the  hope  of  freedom.  Neither  can  go 
back  to  the  life  of  the  immediate  past,  and  they 
ride  forth  over  the  wintry  plains  to  love  and  to 
death. 

Das  tausendjahrige  Reich  (1900)  is  a  study 
in  folk  psychology.  The  smith  Drewfs  is  con- 
vinced of  the  coming  of  the  millennium  and  reads 
the  signs  of  the  times  in  the  light  of  the  Apoca- 
lypse. His  cruel  fanaticism  drives  his  wife  to  her 
death.  He  calls  upon  God  to  bear  witness  to 
his  innocence,  and  the  lightning,  that  breaks  over 
the  village  after  a  long  drouth,  strikes  his  smithy. 
Of  a  more  haunting  power  and  sterner  beauty  is 
Der  Strom  (1904).  The  Vistula  is  the  real  pro- 
Xagonist.  The  frozen  stream,  threatening  to 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       139 

burst  its  dikes,  looms  in  its  passive  majesty  above 
the  wrongs  and  loves  of  the  Doom  family.  At 
the  decisive  moment  of  their  fate  the  ice  breaks, 
the  country  side  is  in  terror,  and  Peter  Doom, 
the  dike-reeve,  is  able  to  expiate  his  sin  in  de- 
fence of  the  land  and  its  folk. 

All  these  plays  end,  it  will  be  observed,  in  a 
violent  catastrophe.  Therein  lies  Halbe's  weak- 
ness. He  can  project,  dramatically,  with  the  ut- 
most power,  an  emotion  or  a  mood.  Having 
done  so  he  has  exhausted  his  peculiar  gift;  he 
cannot  carry  a  fable  to  its  simple  and  convincing 
conclusion.  But  he  finds  us  through  the  mem- 
ories that  our  hearts  treasure,  memories  of  home 
and  youth  and  of  some  landscape  that  means 
home  and  youth  to  us. 

Max  Dreyer  (b.  1862)  a  North  German  from 
Mecklenburg  made  his  appearance  in  1892  with 
a  closely  observed  and  closely  woven  psycholog- 
ical drama,  Drei.  The  verisimilitude  of  charac- 
ter and  dialogue  is,  as  in  all  the  work  of  this 
group  of  men,  above  reproach.  But  I  am  not 
convinced  that  Dreyer  has  contributed  any  highly 
personal  element  to  the  naturalistic  drama. 
Wintersclilaf  (1895)  which  is,  like  Halbe's  Der 
Strom,  a  landscape  play,  is  an  admirably  com- 


,140          THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

petent  work  of  a  given  order,  but  no  more. 
Dreyer  won  his  great  success  in  1899  with  Der 
Probekandidat.  The  drama  that  exhausts  the 
physical  and  psychical  characteristics  of  a  nar- 
rowly delimited  milieu  or  class  or  profession  is 
among  the  special  kinds  that  naturalism  has  cul- 
tivated. Dreyer  turned  his  attention  to  the  Ger- 
man gymnasium  and  the  important  subject  of 
the  freedom  of  teaching.  He  presents  a  young 
teacher  of  biology,  Dr.  Heitmann,  who  has  many 
reasons  for  clinging  to  his  position,  among  them 
an  admirable  mother  whose  last  hopes  are  fixed 
on  him.  He  is  driven  out  of  his  profession  for 
refusing  to  palter  with  the  truth.  Around  Heit- 
mann are  grouped  a  set  of  extraordinarily  vivid 
characters — the  director  of  the  gymnasium, 
swayed  by  every  breath  of  ministerial  policy,  the 
church  dignitary  who  is  determined  that  Dar- 
winism shall  not  corrupt  the  mind  of  Christian 
youth,  the  teacher  who  is  breaking  down  under 
the  pressure  of  intellectual  tyranny,  and  the 
teacher  who  imitates  and  flatters  the  director  for 
the  sake  of  professional  preferment.  The  dra- 
matic values  of  the  situation  are  used  with  a 
touch  of  cleverness  (especially  in  the  central 
scene  of  the  faculty  meeting)  which  Hauptmann 
would  disdain,  but  which  never  degenerates  into 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       141 

mere  external  effectiveness.  The  play  enjoyed  a 
very  remarkable  run  on  the  stage,  and  gave  rise 
to  a  number  of  dramatic  interpretations  of  Ger- 
man school  life  no  less  successful  than  itself. 
The  most  amusing  of  these  is  Otto  Ernst's 
Flachsmann  ah  Erzieher  (1901),  the  most  deeply 
felt  and  clearly  projected,  the  very  moving  Trau- 
mulus  (1904)  by  Arno  Holz  and  Otto  Jerschke. 

Nearest  to  Hauptmann  in  the  quality  of  his 
gifts  and  in  his  mastery  of  naturalistic  technique 
stands  Georg  Hirschfeld  (b.  1873).  Condemned 
to  an  early  maturity  by  his  Berlin  environment 
and  by  his  race,  Hirschfeld  has  not  fulfilled  the 
promise  of  his  marvellous  youth.  At  twenty  he 
wrote  Zu  Hause  (1893),  at  twenty-two,  Die 
Mutter  (1895),  at  twenty-five,  Agnes  Jordan 
(1898).  Later  he  essayed  the  polemic  play  of 
literary  life,  Der  junge  Goldner  (1901),  the 
fairy  play,  Der  Weg  zum  Licht  (1902),  and  even 
comedy,  Spatfriihling  (1906).  None  of  these 
later  pieces  are  contemptible,  but  none  are  ex- 
traordinary. I  trust  that  a  second  spring  of  crea- 
tive vision  will  come  to  him:  for  the  present  his 
career  may  be  said  to  have  ended  with  Agnes  Jor- 
dan. 

The  three  plays  of  his  youth,  however,  en- 


142  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

title  him  to  a  place  among  the  minor  but  genu- 
ine masters  of  the  modem  drama.  He  shares 
with  the  other  naturalists  the  power  of  creating, 
without  rift  or  seam,  the  illusion  of  reality.  He 
adds  thereto  the  special  power  of  conveying  the 
obscure  and  intricate  life  of  the  soul.  His  char- 
acters yield  up  to  us,  especially  in  Agnes  Jordan^ 
that  incommunicable  inner  life  which  each  of  us 
shelters  in  his  own  breast.  Nor  do  they  yield  it 
up  by  elaborate  speeches  or  undramatic  revela- 
tions, but  by  simple  and  natural  words  about  sim- 
ple and  natural  things.  In  a  syllable,  in  a  glance, 
life  wrests  their  secret  from  them  and  it  is  ours. 
The  one  act  play,  Zu  Hause,  showed  a  mature 
and  finished  art.  The  elder  Doergens,  a  business 
man  of  warm  feelings,  sensitive  and  really  high- 
minded,  has  been  broken  in  will  and  degraded  in 
spirit  by  the  pressure  of  existence.  His  wife  is 
mercilessly  exacting  in  her  love  of  pleasure,  his 
younger  son  spoiled,  cynical,  ignorant  of  the  very 
qualities  of  affection  and  respect.  His  youngest 
child  is  a  hopeless  invalid.  This  little  daugh- 
ter's illness  was  the  last  blow  to  Doergens'  soul. 
We  see  him  come  in  from  a  long  day  of  money- 
making  in  the  cold  of  a  Berlin  winter,  loaded 
with  bundles,  weary  in  body,  sick  at  heart.  But 
his  wife's  guests  are  already  there,  her  creditors 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       143 

are  at  the  door.  She  asks  for — money.  No  one 
has  told  him  that  his  older  son  Ludwig  is  com- 
ing home  that  night;  no  one  has  had  time.  The 
son  comes — a  young  physician — after  a  three- 
years  absence  and  the  terrible  conditions  of  that 
home  are  gradually  unfolded.  It  is  all  painful 
and  very  unheroic.  When  Doergens  presses  the 
hand  of  his  first-born  and  tells  him  that,  despite 
the  burden  of  life,  he  does  not  agree  with  his 
wife  that  Ludwig  need  sink  all  his  ambitions  into 
earning  money,  he  has  no  better  eloquence  at  his 
command  than  you  or  I.  But  his  tragedy  is 
being  enacted  in  the  apartment  next  to  ours  or 
in  the  house  next  door.  If  it  be  the  end  of  a 
tragic  action  to  purge  the  emotions  through  pity 
and  terror,  that  end  is  here  achieved. 

Die  Miitter^  which  was  Hirschfeld's  great  suc- 
cess on  the  stage,  has  none  of  the  hard,  irresistible 
pathos  of  Zu  Hause.  He  has  lavished  all  his 
strong  and  beautiful  art  upon  engaging  our  be- 
lief for  his  central  incident.  The  characters  are 
indisputably  alive;  the  milieu  of  the  Berlin  poor 
in  the  second  act  is  consummately  done.  Yet  we 
are  not  convinced  that  the  working  girl,  although 
she  was  to  become  a  mother,  gave  back  her  artist 
lover  to  his  family  without  resistance,  for  his  art's 
sake.  Throughout  the  play  there  runs  an  elegiac 


144          THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

note  that  was  new  to  naturalistic  art  and  that 
foreshadowed  the  dominant  tone  of  Agnes  Jor- 
dan. 

Until  Arnold  Bennett  and  Edward  Knoblauch 
wrote  Milestones  (1912),  the  structure  of  Agnes 
Jordan  was  unique  in  the  history  of  the  modern 
drama.  The  happenings  of  the  first  act  take 
place  in  1865,  of  the  second  in  1873,  of  the  third 
and  fourth  in  1882,  of  the  fifth  in  1896.  The 
purpose  of  the  play  is  twofold:  to  embrace  and 
interpret  the  whole  fate  of  Agnes  Jordan  herself, 
and  to  delineate  the  changing  characteristics  of  a 
certain  social  group  in  the  city  of  Berlin.  The 
instructed  reader  or  spectator  divines  without  dif- 
ficulty, despite  Hirschfeld's  immense  reserve  and 
scrupulous  objectivity,  a  noble  personal  motive 
behind  the  second  purpose  of  the  play.  He  de- 
sired to  show  how  the  Jewish  middle  class  of 
Berlin  (never  without  its  sprinkling  of  high- 
minded  men  and  women)  had  become  softened, 
broadened  and  refined  during  the  thirty  years 
spanned  by  his  action.  To  this  purpose  the  pe- 
culiar power  of  the  drama  is  closely  allied.  The 
character-work  of  the  naturalists  is  intense  and 
incomparably  convincing.  But  it  is  static.  The 
actions  of  their  plays  are  completed  within  a  few 
hours,  days,  or,  at  most,  weeks.  Hence  these  ac- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       145 

tions  are  the  results  of  character  as  it  is,  not  as 
it  is  becoming.  Nor  is  this  a  surprising  fact. 
For  it  cannot  be  often  within  the  reach  of  any 
artist  to  combine  that  pitch  of  verisimilitude 
which  naturalism  demands  with  a  consistent  de- 
velopment of  character.  Hirschfeld  alone,  in 
this  single  play,  has  met  the  utmost  stringency 
of  both  demands.  We  see  Agnes  in  the  radiant 
charm  of  her  hopeful  youth,  in  the  bitter  revolt 
of  her  disillusioned  womanhood,  in  the  serene 
freedom  of  soul  which  her  dedication  to  duty  has 
given  her  at  last;  we  see  her  children  as  boys  and 
as  men,  and  we  doubt  no  more  that  this  is  the 
same  woman,  these  the  same  lads,  than  we  would 
doubt  it  of  the  familiar  friends  of  all  our  years. 
The  irrepressible,  impossible  Jordan  alone, 
though  he  loses  the  power  to  hurt,  does  not 
change.  And  in  that  contrast  Hirschfeld  touches 
the  highest  point  of  his  art.  For  it  is  the  tragedy 
of  the  shallow  and  the  self-opinionated  that  they 
cannot  mellow  or  soften  or  rise  beyond  them- 
selves. Just  as  Jordan  dragged  his  young  wife 
from  Beethoven  to  hear  Meyerbeer,  so,  in  his  old 
age,  he  splutters  to  his  son,  a  musician  and  a 
disciple  of  Brahms  and  Wagner:  'Think  of  the 
money  that  fellow  Mascagni  is  making!"  I  can- 
not touch  upon  the  wealth  of  true  and  harmonious 


146          THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

detail  by  which  these  central  characters  are  sur- 
rounded. The  play,  despite  its  large  inclusive- 
ness,  is  never  discursive,  never  loses  its  austere 
unity  of  action,  tone  and  thought.  It  is  a  piece 
of  life — life  with  its  sadness,  its  sordidness,  its 
evil  compulsions,  its  disillusions,  but  also  with 
those  brave,  indomitable  dreams,  given  up  by  one 
frustrate  generation  only  to  be  passed  on  to  the 
next  which,  though  doomed  perhaps  to  defeat  in 
its  turn,  will  yet  not  suffer  the  sacred  torch  to 
be  extinguished. 


German  literature  has  sustained  no  deeper  ioss 
in  this  generation  than  it  did  when  Otto  Erich 
Hartleben  died  in  1905  at  the  early  age  of  forty- 
one.  A  master  of  dramaturgy,  the  possessor  of 
a  style  in  dialogue  no  less  exact,  but  more  subtle, 
witty  and  eloquent  than  that  of  the  consistent 
naturalists,  he  was  also  a  brave  and  incisive 
thinker.  In  this  quality,  too,  he  stands  in  con- 
trast to  the  naturalist.  The  latter  absorbs  life 
and  re-creates  it.  So  soon  as  he  thinks,  as 
Goethe  said  of  Byron,  he  becomes  a  child.  Now 
Hartleben's  plays  are  drenched  with  thought.  I 
had  almost  called  him  a  German  Shaw.  But  I 
know  very  well  that  Hartleben  must  have  thought 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       147 

Shaw  a  prig;  I  am  equally  sure  that  Shaw,  could 
he  read  Hartleben,  would  think  him  a  cad.  The 
antinomy  is  the  old  but  tremendously  real  one 
between  Hellenism  and  Hebraism.  To  Hart- 
leben the  life  of  the  senses  is  a  fact  and  a  splendid 
fact;  to  Shaw  it  is  a  burden  that  is  to  be  stripped 
of  glamour  and  romance  and  solemnly  dedicated 
to  eugenic  uses.  Hartleben  sees  in  it  a  clean  and 
radiant  thing  which  we  have  contorted  and  de- 
filed through  moral  conventions  that  are  rooted 
in  the  lust  of  power  and  the  greed  of  gold. 

He  explains  his  point  of  view  with  great  verve 
and  fine  precision  in  his  satiric  play,  Die  Erzie- 
liung  zur  Eke  (1893).  A  young  man  of  good 
family  may  not  marry  at  the  age  when  love  is 
a  clean  and  instinctive  passion,  because  he  can- 
not yet  properly  support  a  wife  and  children  of 
his  own  class.  Neither,  however,  will  respect- 
able society  permit  him  to  have  a  mistress  who 
is  also  comrade  and  friend.  The  attachment 
may  become  too  strong  and  our  young  man  may 
publicly  outrage  public  morality.  So  society 
forces  him  to  abandon  such  a  mistress  with  brutal 
abruptness  and  then  damns  her  for  becoming  a 
harlot.  To  the  young  man,  however,  it  whis- 
pers that  harlots  are  his  proper  resort  until  his 
income  entitles  him  to  the  spotless  respectability 


148          THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

of  an  appropriate  marriage.  And  thus  he  comes 
to  marriage  at  last,  worn  out  in  body  and  cor- 
rupted in  his  emotions  but — respectable.  Raised 
to  a  very  much  loftier  plane,  the  theme  of  that 
most  beautiful  and  moving  tragedy  Rosenmon- 
tag  (1900)  is  still  the  same. 

The  recognition  of  this  tangle  of  unclean  incon- 
sistencies drove  Hartleben  into  a  completely  an- 
archic scepticism  on  the  whole  subject  of  social, 
and  specifically,  of  sexual  morality.  "If  God 
made  the  world,"  the  abandoned  girl  argues  in 
Die  Erziehung  zur  Eke,  "we  may  surely  accept 
man  with  the  instincts  and  the  nature  which  God 
gave  him."  "But  if  God  did  not  make  the 
world,"  she  goes  on,  "then  I  don't  see  at  all  how 
we  dare  to  demand  of  man  that  he  be  other  than 
he  is."  "But,  Meta,"  the  young  student  ex- 
claims, "that  point  of  view  would  put  an  end  to 
all  moral  judgments!"  And  with  a  harsh  sin- 
cerity the  girl  replies:  "Yes,  and  that's  what 
ought  to  be  done !" 

Hartleben's  scepticism  went  a  step  farther. 
From  a  distrust  of  social  morality  he  passes  to 
a  distrust  of  man  as  an  organiser  of  society  at  all. 
Hence  at  the  height  of  the  naturalistic  movement 
which  is  so  firmly  founded  on  socialism  and  so- 
cial compassion,  he  alone  sounded  a  note  of  op- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       149 

position  in  his  austerest  play,  Hanna  Jagert 
(1893).  What  is  the  use  of  throwing  over  one 
set  of  compulsions  for  a  newer,  cruder,  and  per- 
haps, on  trial,  more  galling  set?  That  is  the 
conclusion  to  which  Hanna  Jagert  is  finally 
brought.  She  has  satisfied  her  own  unborrowed 
sense  of  honour  and  purity  and  feels  a  deep  lib- 
eration from  the  disgrace  of  force  and  conflict. 
You  may  bully  the  individual  soul  in  the  name 
of  bourgeois  morality;  you  may  bully  it  in  the 
name  of  the  collective  welfare.  The  individual 
soul,  the  free  personality,  is  still  the  one  signifi- 
cant thing  in  the  world  and  you — are  still  a  bully. 
I  would  guard  against  conveying  the  impres- 
sion that  Hartleben's  art,  like  Brieux's  or  Shaw's, 
is  argumentative.  Not  so.  He  shows  his  aspects 
of  truth  in  embodiments  as  objective  and  as  pun- 
gently  concrete  as  any  naturalist.  But  his  work 
has  intellectual  copiousness;  it  has  zest  and  wit; 
it  has  an  aroma  that  is  almost  heady.  Unlike 
the  minor  naturalists,  Hartleben  was  not  only  a 
dramatist,  but  also  a  poet.  His  work  is  less 
grave  than  theirs,  perhaps,  in  its  totality,  less 
solid — even  less  permanently  built.  But,  for  our 
time,  it  has  extraordinary  richness  and  charm. 

The  drastic  plays  of  Hartleben  seem  almost 


150  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

reactionary  beside  the  cold  analysis  of  Frank 
Wedekind  (b.  1864).  The  moral  ideas  of  or- 
ganised society  had  Hartleben  in  their  grip. 
That  is  why  he  spent  his  life  in  the  combat  ex- 
pressed by  his  motto:  In  Philistros!  Wedekind 
betrays  no  consciousness  of  the  existence  of  any 
moral  standards  or  restraints.  He  simply  sets 
down  the  partial  but  penetrating  vision  of  his 
anarchic  soul.  The  atmosphere  of  scandal  that, 
for  a  time,  surrounded  his  name,  is  quite  mislead- 
ing. His  problems  are,  to  be  sure,  exclusively 
erotic.  But  the  corrupt  mind  that  goes  to  him 
for  sensual  allurement  will  be  curiously  disap- 
pointed. This  fact  was  clearly  demonstrated  in 
the  proceedings  brought  against  Wedekind  and 
his  publisher  in  1904.  The  superior  court  recog- 
nised the  apparent  monstrousness  of  Die  Buchse 
der  Pandora,  but  had  the  good  sense  to  decide 
that  so  unsparing  a  presentation  of  vice  could 
harm  no  one.  Of  the  possible  moral  effect  of 
his  plays  Wedekind  himself  is,  I  imagine,  quite 
careless.  But  his  nature  is  dry  and  his  artistic 
processes,  arbitrary  as  they  are,  have  an  indefin- 
able coldness  and  impersonality. 

His  first  and  best  play,  by  which  both  his  fame 
and  his  infamy  were  established,  is  Friihlings 
Erwachen  (1894).  And  no  competent  account 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       151 

of  the  modern  drama  can  venture  to  omit  this 
highly  remarkable  work.  Whatever  the  precep- 
tist  critic  may  urge  against  subjects  fit  only  for 
the  clinic  or  the  text-book  of  pathology,  the  over- 
whelming fact  must  give  even  him  pause  that 
modern  literature,  in  all  tongues  and  countries, 
is  driven  by  the  impulse  to  make  its  content  co- 
extensive with  life  itself.  To  deplore  this  im- 
pulse is  legitimate;  to  set  oneself  against  it  is 
futile.  The  great  historical  waves  of  tendency 
will  stop  for  no  man's  discomfort.  The  shores 
of  literature  are  strewn  with  the  wreckage  of 
critics  who,  in  one  form  or  another,  have  uttered 
the  cry  of  Jeffrey  on  Wordsworth:  "This  will 
never  do !" 

In  Fruhlings  Erwachen  Wedekind  set  himself 
the  task  of  describing  and  interpreting  the  sexual 
difficulties  of  adolescence.  Partly  by  the  force 
of  his  own  temperament,  partly  on  account  of  the 
difficulties  of  his  theme,  he  abandoned  the  mas- 
sive and  continuous  technique  of  naturalism. 
The  play  consists  of  a  large  number  of  scenes, 
unrelated  as  far  as  external  structure  goes,  but 
each  giving  us  a  swift  and  sudden  insight  into 
the  souls  and  bodies  of  his  characters.  These 
scenes  do  not,  in  any  ordinary  sense,  develop  a 
fable;  they  do  succeed,  in  their  totality,  in  pre- 


152  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

senting  a  highly  complex  condition  that  manifests 
itself  variously  through  the  medium  of  various 
souls.  Each  scene,  moreover,  though  of  a  haunt- 
ing reality  of  impression,  is  lifted-  above  the 
physical  crassness  of  its  incidents  by  a  strange 
remoteness  of  speech  and  gesture  that  clings  to 
all  the  characters.  Thus  even  the  incredibly  dar- 
ing incident  in  the  Korrektiomanstalt  fills  one 
with  compassion  rather  than  with  disgust.  It  is 
not  hard  to  disengage  in  fairly  exact  terms  the 
thoughts  to  which  the  shifting  scenes  of  the  play 
correspond:  The  youth  of  the  race  is  seized  at 
a  certain  period  by  inevitable  instincts  and  pas- 
sions. Society  is  so  organised,  however,  and  con- 
ventions are  so  fixed,  that  youth  attains  no  clar- 
ity concerning  these  instincts,  but  struggles  with 
them  in  the  lurid  twilight  of  ignorance  and  of 
phantastic  guilt.  Thus  bodies  are  corrupted  and 
souls  perverted  by  the  mysterious  degradation  of 
the  race's  very  condition  of  continuance.  A  mor- 
bid importance  then  surrounds  the  instinct  of  sex ; 
it  penetrates  all  the  recesses  of  the  nature;  it  be- 
comes unclean;  it  gives  rise  to  practices  that 
deepen  the  evil  and  unnatural  sense  of  guilt. 
These  facts  no  sane  observer  of  society  will  deny. 
In  Wedekind's  play  they  are  rendered  objective 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       153 

in  a  manner  that  will  deeply  stir  the  mature  mind 
to  compassion  and  reflection. 

An  arbitrary  and  phantastic  element  which  ad- 
mirably softened  the  incidents  of  Wedekind's  first 
play  has,  unhappily,  asserted  itself  in  his  later 
work  to  the  exclusion  of  saner  qualities.  His 
characters  have  become  increasingly  eccentric  un- 
til all  recognisable  human  motives  and  actions 
seem  often  obscured.  His  most  solid  and  valu- 
able achievement,  after  Friihlings  Envachen  is 
Erdgeist  (1895)  with  its  sequel  Die  Buchse  der 
Pandora  (1904).  The  protagonist  of  these 
pieces  is  a  Nana  who  never,  like  Zola's  heroine, 
exceeds  the  possibilities  of  her  type,  although  she 
too  symbolises  the  lure  and  ruthless  cruelty  of 
the  flesh.  It  is  possible  that  the  peculiar  virtues 
of  some  of  his  more  recent  plays  elude  my  percep- 
tion. The  man  has  in  him  the  seeds  of  a  new 
technique  and  of  a  new  fashion  of  dealing  with 
life.  And  these  seeds  may,  before  the  merely  pro- 
testing critic  is  aware,  produce  an  art  which,  how- 
ever repugnant  to  our  immediate  tastes,  will  not 
permit  itself  to  be  neglected. 


154  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

VI 

"For  dream  and  waking  with  each  other  blend, 
Falsehood  and  truth,  and  certainty  is  not." 
Schnitzler's  Paracelsus. 

"De  quelque  f  agon  que  Ton  congoive  la  vie,  et  la 
connut-on  pour  le  reve  d'un  reve,  on  vit." 

Anatole  France. 

Second  to  Hauptmann  alone  in  the  rank  of 
modern  German  playwrights  and  one  of  the  most 
notable  creative  artists  of  our  age  is  the  Viennese 
physician,  Arthur  Schnitzler  (b.  1862).  In  his 
work  the  naturalist's  fidelity  to  truth  and  his  mas- 
sive simplicity  of  technique  have  undergone  an 
exquisite  transformation.  Schnitzler  is  master  of 
both.  But  he  has  sought  to  disengage  the  poetry 
and  the  pathos  of  our  lives.  He  has  brooded 
upon  the  contents  of  our  experience  and  cannot 
find  in  his  heart  the  stern  or  even  militant  ac- 
cents of  the  naturalists  of  the  North.  The  soul 
of  man  is  a  great  country  (Das  weite  Land, 
1910)  in  which  live  side  by  side  strange  beauty 
and  terror,  yearning  and  desire.  Our  motives  are 
never  unmixed,  our  actions  never  single  in  pur- 
pose; good  and  evil  are  but  coarse  names  for  ab- 
stract extremes  which  reality  never  approaches. 
Hence  "it  is  better  to  give  happiness  than  to  be 
guiltless"  (Der  emsame  Weg,  1903).  Happi- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       155 

ness  we  must  needs  desire  and  our  only  chance 
of  possessing  even  its  shadow  is  by  yielding  to 
experience,  not  by  refusing  it.  This  does  not 
mean  romantic  bustle — fighting  or  sea-faring. 
"It  needs  no  special  display  of  events  or  adven- 
tures in  order  to  experience  something"  (Zwisch- 
enspiel,  1904).  But  we  must  not  deny  our- 
selves to  the  illusions  of  fame,  of  love,  of  youth ! 
Of  youth  pre-eminently,  for  "so  long  as  one  is 
young,  all  doors  are  open,  and  beyond  every  door 
the  world  begins"  (Der  einsame  Weg}.  Such 
is  the  poetry  of  life.  Its  pathos  lies  in  the  transi- 
toriness  of  all  our  illusions,  the  briefness  and  pre- 
cariousness  of  our  truly  "living  hours,"  the  lone- 
liness of  the  soul  and  the  imminent  shadow  of 
death.  In  the  shimmer  of  life's  dissolving  ap- 
pearances art  is  an  enduring  element.  "Living 
hours?  They  live  no  longer  than  the  last  man 
who  remembers  them.  It  is  not  the  meanest  call- 
ing to  lend  such  hours  a  permanence  beyond  them- 
selves" (Lebendige  Stunden,  1901). 

The  thirst  for  the  illusion  and  the  necessity 
of  yielding  to  it — these  are  the  two  notes  tkr 
Schnitzler  is  never  weary  of  sounding.     "By  th 
way,"  says  a  character  in  Der  einsame  Weg,  "I 
know  a  man  who  is  eighty-three  years  old;  h 
has  buried  two  wives,  seven  children,  not  to  men- 


156  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

tion  grandchildren,  and  he  plays  the  piano  in  a 
shabby  little  music-hall  in  the  park,  while  artists 
of  both  sexes  display  on  the  stage  their  tights  and 
the  flutter  of  their  short  skirts.  Well,  the  other 
day,  when  the  wretched  show  was  over  and  they 
were  putting  out  the  lanterns,  strangely  enough 
he  went  on,  imperturbably,  playing  on  the  vile 
box.  And  so  we  invited  him,  Ronsky  and  I,  to 
sit  down  at  our  table  and  we  began  to  chat  with 
him.  And  he  told  us  that  the  last  piece  he  had 
played  was  his  own  composition.  Naturally  we 
complimented  him.  And  then  his  eyes  shone  and 
he  asked  in  his  trembling  voice :  'Do  you  believe, 
gentlemen,  that  my  work  will  be  successful?'  He 
is  eighty-three  years  old,  and  his  career  is  ending 
in  a  little  music-hall  in  the  park,  and  his  audience 
is  composed  of  nurse-girls  and  corporals  and  the 
yearning  of  his  soul  is — their  applause.3'  Thus 
ends  a  life  that  was  permitted  to  spend  itself  for 
its  proper  illusions.  What  of  a  life  that  was 
denied  them?  To  the  old  musician  Weiring  in 
Liebelei  (1894)  c°mes  a  neighbour  to  console 
him  for  the  death  of  his  sister,  an  elderly  spinster. 

Katharina:  ,But  it  must  be  a  real  consolation  to  know 
that  you  were  always  the  benefactor  and  protector  of  a 
poor  dear  creature  like  that — 

Weiring:     Yes,  I  used  to  imagine  that  too,  long  ago, 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       157 

when  she  was  a  lovely  young  girl,  and  I  seemed  to  my- 
self Heaven  knows  how  clever  and  noble.  But  then  later 
when  the  grey  hairs  began  to  come  and  the  wrinkles,  and 
one  day  passed  after  another — and  with  them  all  her 
youth — and  the  girl  gradually  became — one  hardly  no- 
tices such  things,  you  know — an  old'  spinster,  if  was  only 
then  that  I  began  to  feel  what  I  had  really  done. 

Katharina:     But  Mr.  Weiring  .  .  . 

Weiring:  I  see  her  before  me  this  minute,  the  w^y 
she  used  to  sit  opposite  me  so  often,  in  the  evening,  in  the 
room  there  by  the  lamplight,  and  look  at  me  with  that 
quiet  smile  of  hers,  with  that  utterly  resigned  smile — as 
though  she  wanted  to  thank  me ;  and  I — I  felt  as  though 
I  had  to  throw  myself  at  her  feet  and  beg  her  to  forgive 
me  for  having  guarded  her  so  well  from  all  danger  and 
from,  all  delight. 

But  there  is  a  sharper  tragedy  than  that — to 
grasp  one's  illusions,  like  the  golden  leaves  in 
the  fairy  tale,  and  find  them  autumn  foliage,  sere 
and  wind-blown.  That  is  the  deepest  experience 
of  all  the  characters  of  Schnitzler  from  Anatol 
(1890)  to  Das  weite  Land  (1910).  Love  and 
delight  and  even  sorrow  slip  from  us  on  our  soli- 
tary path;  we  yearn  for  the  reality  of  enduring 
spiritual  values  and  are  lost  amid  the  imperma- 
nence  of  dreams.  And  therefore  Schnitzler's 
men  and  women,  even  in  the  pursuit  of  their  dear- 
est illusions,  are  touched  with  sadness.  Pensively 
they  walk  in  those  Viennese  gardens  which  their 


158  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

creator  loves  to  delineate — discoursing  of  love  and 
life  and  death.  The  light  there  is  never  radiant, 
the  darkness  is  never  sombre;  a  mild  wind  stirs 
the  tops  of  the  slender  poplars  that  stand  against 
the  fading  orange  of  the  evening  sky. 

This  interpretation  of  the  spirit  of  Schnitzler's 
work  may  seem  to  be  incomplete  since  it  does  not 
stress  the  note  of  social  protest  heard  in  a  few 
of  his  earlier  plays:  Das  Mdrchen  (1891),  Frei- 
wild  (1896)  and  Das  Vermdchtnis  (1897).  In 
sounding  that  note,  however,  Schnitzler  was  im- 
pelled primarily  by  the  spirit  of  a  particular 
decade.  And  even  as  it  is,  the  note  is  softened, 
almost  muffled,  and  the  conclusion  of  the  whole 
matter  is  hardly  a  summons  to  revolt  or  even  re- 
form, but  rather  in  harmony  with  that  wise  sen- 
tence which  Matthew  Arnold  loved  to  quote: 
"Things  are  as  they  are;  why  then  should  we 
strive  to  be  deceived?"  In  Das  Mdrchen,  for  in- 
stance, the  problem  is  that  of  the  girl — in  this 
case  a  gifted  young  actress — who  has  made  a  mis- 
take of  youth  and  passion.  Shall  no  sweetness 
of  spirit,  no  power  of  love,  make  her  the  equal  of 
any  shallow  but  unspotted  creature?  And  what 
about  the  purity  of  men?  The  intellect  of  Fedor 
Weill  and  his  sense  of  justice  rebel  against  so 
cruel  and  unequal  a  convention.  But  the  test 


THE  DRAMA,  IN  GERMANY       159 

comes,  and  all  that  he  can  see  in  Fanny's  eyes  are 
alien  memories,  all  that  he  can  feel  upon  her  lips 
are  the  kisses  with  which  she  was  unfaithful  to 
him  before  she  knew  him.  'Things  are  as  they 
are!"  He  lets  her  go  from  him.  "What  has 
been — is;  therein  lies  the  deep  meaning  of  all  past 
events." 

In  Freiwild,  the  finest  dramatic  treatment  of 
the  theme  of  honour — incomparably  superior  to 
Sudermann's  and  Hartleben's  plays — and  in  Das 
Vermachtnis,  Schnitzler's  mood  is  more  practical, 
his  tone  sharper,  his  attack  more  definite.  But  in 
these  two*  plays  he  treats  conventions  and  preju- 
dices of  a  merely  social  order.  Now  it  is  the 
special  praise  of  his  art  that  it  deals,  in  all  its 
finest  examples,  not  with  the  laws  of  society  but 
with  the  soul  of  man.  His  are  not  Hauptmann's 
great  notes  of  hunger,  love  and  prayer.  Our 
dreams,  our  disillusions  are  his  theme;  above  all, 
our  yearning  for  harmony  and  permanence, 
quenchless  and  doomed  to  an  eternity  of  defeat. 

All  his  favourite  motives  appear  in  his  earliest 
dramatic  work,  the  group  of  one-act  plays  called 
Anatol  (1889-1890).  In  the  first  play  Anatol's 
mistress  rests  in  hypnotic  sleep;  he  may  now  ask 
her  whether  she  loves  him  and  is  true  to  him. 
He  does  not  ask,  for  it  is  by  our  illusions  that 


160  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

we  live.  The  second  play  is  a  miniature  tragedy 
because  Gabriele  has  never  had  the  courage  to 
yield  to  the  supreme  illusion  of  love.  And  in 
the  third  play  an  exquisite  illusion — true  as  the 
truth  itself  but  for  a  stupid  coincidence — is 
broken.  Nor  is  Schnitzler's  deeper  thought  ab- 
sent from  the  apparent  frivolity  of  these  ex- 
quisite sketches.  For  even  the  elegant  trifler 
Anatol  is,  in  his  way,  a  seeker  for  permanence 
amid  the  shadows  that  glide  by  us.  The  work- 
manship was,  even  in  this  early  effort,  in  har- 
mony with  the  spirit  of  Schnitzler's  theme. 
What  lightness  and  firmness  of  structure !  What 
exquisite  limpidness  in  the  medium  of  dialogue!' 
What  melancholy  and  caressing  grace!  It 
seemed  as  though  the  spirit  of  old  Vienna  and 
of  Mozart  had  blended  with  that  of  this  modern 
man  of  science,  this  fundamentally  naturalistic 
playwright,  who  never  shirks  the  verisimilitude 
of  honest  art,  but  who  can  draw  from  reality  a 
music  so  subtle,  sweet  and  mournful. 

That  music  grows  deeper  and  graver  in 
Liebelei.  The  play  is  usually  held  to  be  Schnitz- 
ler's masterpiece.  Its  theme  is  the  playing  with 
love  that  may  hide  a  tragic  passion,  the  gentle 
comedy  of  a  springtime  that  may  end  in  terror. 
The  lilacs  are  fragrant  in  the  play,  and  from  the 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       161 

high  window  of  Christine's  room  we  feel  the 
winds  of  spring  carrying  love  and  death.  But 
higher  than  Liebelei,  and  higher  than  the  one-act 
plays — a  form  of  which  Schnitzler  is  the  undis- 
puted master — Die  Gefahrtin  (1898)  or  Leben- 
dige  S  fund  en  (1901) — I  am  inclined  to  rate  two 
of  his  later  dramas:  Der  einsame  V/eg  (1903) 
and  Der  Ruf  des  Lebens  (1905).  To  recount 
the  fables  of  these  plays  would  be  quite  futile. 
For  the  virtue  of  Schnitzler's  art  does  not  reside 
in  the  powerful  or  clever  or  consistent  handling 
of  an  action,  although  he  can  handle  an  action  in 
all  those  ways;  it  resides  in  the  creation  of  a 
spiritual  atmosphere  which,  by  its  freedom  and 
largeness,  interprets  not  only  the  lives  of  his  char- 
acters but  sends  out  a  glow  in  the  light  of  which 
we,  too,  can  interpret  our  experience  of  soul  and 
sense.  This  is  especially  true  of  Der  einsame 
Weg.  The  people  in  this  play  love  the  illusions 
by  which  we  live.  But  all  delusions  they  have 
put  away.  Theirs  are  no  ready-made  ethical 
precepts  or  prejudices  by  which  reality  is  schema- 
tised into  a  system,  and  our  actions  reduced  to 
symbols  of  mere  arbitrary  values.  These  men 
and  women  are  in  touch  with  the  concrete  facts 
of  life — the  eternally  separate  and  individual  im- 
pulses and  actions  which  no  man  can  adjudge  and 


162  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

no  generalisation  reach.  To  read  this  beautiful 
and  subtle  work  aright  is  a  liberal  education  in 
the  virtue  of  charity  and  the  art  of  living.  For 
the  deepest  and  central  fact  of  all  our  experience 
is  that  imperious  call  of  life  which  all  these  peo- 
ple, in  their  various  ways,  have  answered.  One 
may  hang  back  for  a  space;  one  may,  like  the 
Blue  Cuirassiers  in  Der  Ruf  des  Lebens,  inter- 
pret the  call  of  life  as  a  call  of  death.  But  one 
must  yield  at  last,  and  in  the  places  whither  it 
summons — there  build  one's  heavens  and  hells. 
To  refuse  the  call  is  more  than  human — or  less. 
Marie,  in  Der  Ruf  des  Lebens,  dwells  in  a  sullen, 
sultry  unreality  until  she  heeds  the  call.  The 
storm  of  life,  tragic  and  terrible,  whirls  her  along. 
It  leaves  her  broken.  But  having  once  lived,  the 
wise  physician  promises  her  a  resurrection  of  her 
life  some  day. 

The  art  of  Schnitzler  is  an  extraordinarily  ripe 
and  complex  product.  To  communicate  a  sense 
of  its  quality  is  a  matter  of  the  last  difficulty. 
Schnitzler  has  reflected  profoundly,  but  has  de- 
spaired of  building  himself  a  philosophic  or  re- 
ligious vision  of  the  sum  of  things.  Hence  he 
stands  beside  the  stream  of  reality  in  an  attitude 
of  sad  contemplation,  striving  to  disengage  from 
that  various  and  endless  flow  of  appearances 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       163 

such  moods  and  forms  as  hold  at  least  a  shadowy 
prophecy  of  the  direction  in  which  the  stream  is 
tending.  He  knows  that  that  direction,  what- 
ever it  be,  is  changeless,  and  that  the  current  will 
sweep  away  our  protests  like  windlestraws.  To 
yield  ourselves  to  it  is  our  only  wisdom  and  our 
only  hope,  yet  not  to  yield  blindly  or  to  abandon 
that  yearning  for  permanence  which,  be  it  a  last 
illusion  or  not,  is  our  most  human  and  our  most 
tragic  gift. 

VII 

Productivity  in  the  field  of  the  German  as  of 
the  French  drama  during  the  past  twenty-five 
years  has  been  astonishing.  Hence,  in  dealing 
with  it,  as  in  dealing  with  the  drama  in  France, 
I  have  had  to  impose  fairly  rigid  limits  upon  the 
extent  of  my  survey.  In  order  to  observe  these 
limits  it  has  been  necessary  to  omit  names  and 
works  which  the  narrow  specialist  may  expect  to 
find.  Thus  I  have  not  discussed  Hermann  Bahr 
(b.  1863),  the  versatile  friend  and  enemy,  in 
creative  work  and  criticism,  of  many  movements, 
but  a  master  in  the  mood  of  none.  For  very  dif- 
ferent reasons  I  have  omitted  the  striking  and 
popular  art  of  Adam  Beyerlein  (b.  1871),  and 
for  different  reasons  again,  the  powerful  and 


164  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

manly  work  of  the  Tyrolese,  Karl  Schoenherr. 
But  my  survey  includes,  I  believe,  every  con- 
tributor to  the  naturalistic  drama  whose  work  has 
reached  with  any  degree  of  certainty,  a  promise 
of  lasting  value  and  significance. 

That  naturalistic  drama  of  Germany  to  which  I 
attribute  qualities  of  so  high  an  order,  has  attained 
those  qualities  by  turning  its  vision  not  upon  man 
as  he  ought  to  be,  but  as  he  is.  It  has  not  shaped 
its  characters  or  fables  according  to  anterior  laws, 
conventions  or  decrees;  nor  has  it  forced  its  ma- 
terial into  those  moral  categories  by  which  we 
seek  to  rationalise  the  life  of  man,  even  as  by  an- 
other series  of  categories  we  seek  to  rationalise 
the  life  of  nature.  Nor  yet  has  the  naturalistic 
drama  of  Germany,  like  the  naturalistic  novel  of 
France,  merely  narrated  that  concrete,  that  free, 
that  boundless  reality,  but  has  brought  it  im- 
mediately home  to  our  eyes,  our  ears,  our  hearts. 
The  merely  popular  and  the  almost  equally  shal- 
low pseudo-idealistic  protest*  that  such  art  is  de- 
pressing need  not  disturb  one's  estimate  of  this 
drama  at  all.  Such  is  the  life  of  man.  If  we 
cannot  wring  a  bracing  philosophy  or  a  far-reach- 
ing hope  from  it,  we  shall,  at  least,  not  be  de- 
ceived. But  nothing,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  is  so 
so  heartening  as  the  number  of 


THE  DRAMA  IN  GERMANY       165 

souls,  created  without  didactic  consciousness  or 
premeditation  by  the  German  naturalists,  who 
under  the  tyranny  of  hunger,  of  passion,  of  de- 
spair, still  toil  and  battle  for  some  ideal  value: 
for  beauty,  for  justice,  for  liberty,  for  inner  free- 
dom, for  truth — the  souls  whom  Hauptmann  has 
described  so  well  in  Henry  of  Aue: 

"For  they  who  strive  are  they  who  live  albeit 
Erring.     Tireless  to  strive  is  still  to  be 
Upon  a  goodly  road." 


; 


CHAPTER  FOUR 
THE  RENAISSANCE  OF  THE  ENGLISH  DRAMA 


THE  decline  of  the  English  drama  in  the  nine- 
teenth century  has  long  been  a  commonplace  of 
criticism.  Scarcely  less  obvious,  at  least  to-day, 
are  the  two  causes  of  that  decline:  the  loss  of  a 
national  sense  for  the  theatre  as  a  fine  art,  and 
the  crushing  weight  of  the  Shakespearean  tradi- 
tion. The  English  antipathy  to  the  theatre, 
however,  strikes  its  roots  deeply  into  the  nation's 
historical  past;  it  goes  back  to  Stephen  Gosson's 
School  of  Abuse  (1579)  and  to  Jeremy  Collier's 
Short  View  of  the  Immorality  and  Profaneness 
of  the  English  Stage  (1699)  which,  a  century 
later,  drew  from  the  ageing  Dryden  so  touching 
an  admission  and  so  modest  a  defence.  The  last 
school  of  native  English  drama,  moreover,  even  to 
its  latest  exemplars  in  Sheridan,  served  but  to 
deepen  and  harden  that  antipathy.  The  artifi- 
cial comedy  that  flourished  after  the  Restoration, 

whether  derived  from  the  French  stage,  or  but  a 

166 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       167 

new  and  brilliant  continuation  of  the  English 
comedy  of  humours,  was  written  by  the  members 
of  a  small  and  artificial  society  for  its  own  amuse- 
ment. It  could  not  but  complete  the  alienation 
of  the  great  body  of  the  English  people  from  the 
art  of  the  drama.  That  people  was  meanwhile, 
all  during  the  eighteenth  century,  hardening  in 
the  moulds  of  mutually  repellent  classes  and  mu- 
tually exclusive  forms  of  dissent,  until  the  pos- 
sibility of  an  homogeneous  audience — the  first 
condition  of  a  national  theatre — was  definitely 
lost.  The  dramatist  could  make  his  appeal 
neither  to  a  social  consciousness  as  in  France,  nor 
to  an  ethnic  consciousness  as  in  Germany.  The 
situation  was  memorably  summed  up  by  Matthew 
Arnold  in  1879:  "In  England  we  have  no  mod- 
ern drama  at  all.  Our  vast  society  is  not  homo- 
geneous enough,  not  sufficiently  united,  even  any 
large  portion  of  it,  in  a  common  view  of  life,  a 
common  ideal  capable  as  serving  as  basis  for  a 
modern  English  drama." 

Theatres  continued  to  exist  and  plays  to  be 
produced.  But  the  national  alienation  from  the 
drama  as  an  art  affected  the  few  who  went  to  the 
theatre  as  profoundly  as  the  many  who  stayed 
away.  For  the  drama  was  felt  to  be  part  of  the 
ungodly  life  at  the  worst,  of  the  merely  frivolous 


168  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

life  at  best.  The  intellectual  classes  had,  as 
Shaw  puts  it,  become  thoroughly  accustomed  to 
do  without  the  theatre;  to  the  middle  classes  it 
represented  an  occasional  excursion  into  a  slightly 
improper  or  even  degrading  sphere.  What  de- 
mands would  such  an  audience  make?  What 
standards  would  it  be  conscious  of?  The  drama 
that  still  threatens  at  times  the  very  existence  of 
the  English-speaking  stage  is  the  result — the 
drama  that  flatters  the  unintelligent  prejudices 
of  the  crowd  but  allures  its  senses.  In  a  word, 
Pinero's  The  "Mind  the  Paint"  Girl  (1912), 
uniting  a  vast  display  of  finery,  white  shoulders 
and  silk  stockings  with  emphasis  upon  a  moral 
attitude  of  inconceivable  unveracity  and  sloth. 
During  a  great  part  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
however,  the  supply  of  even  such  plays  was  want- 
ing in  England.  The  eminent  masters  of  the 
period  expressed  themselves  through  the  novel 
which,  with  a  notable  tradition  behind  it,  had  at- 
tained the  freedom  and  dignity  of  a  great  art. 
Meanwhile  the  well-made  Parisian  play  was 
translated  and  adapted  by  many  nameless  pur- 
veyors to  the  stage  as  well  as  by  Robertson,  Gil- 
bert, Taylor  and  Charles  Reade.  So  much  a  mat- 
ter of  course  had  this  process  become  that  the 
revivers  of  the  English  drama  found  it  necessary, 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       169 

on  play-bills  and  elsewhere,  to  point  out  the  fact 
that  their  plays  were  "original,"  not  adapted. 
Thus  while  France  produced  the  solid  social  ob- 
servation, the  flexibility  of  moral  outlook  that 
underlie  the  artifice  of  Augier  and  Dumas  fils; 
while  in  Germany  successive  masterpieces  (Heb- 
bel's  Maria  Magdalena,  1843,  Ludwig's  Der 
Erbforster,  1850)  upheld  the  realistic  tradition  of 
Lessing's  maturity  and  of  Schiller's  youth,  Eng- 
land— easily  first  in  poetry  and  prose  fiction — had 
nothing  to  show  but  the  terrible  melodramas  of 
the  elder  Lytton.  (Lady  of  Lyons,  1834; 
Money,  1840). 

How  utterly  devoid  of  standards  that  demand 
either  reality  or  moral  insight  on  the  stage  the 
English  audience  had  become,  is  illustrated  by  the 
success  accorded  several  of  the  comedies,  notably 
Caste  (1867)  of  Thomas  William  Robertson 
(1829-1871).  The  social  and  moral  outlook  of 
Caste  summed  up  in  the  sentence :  "What  brains 
can  break  through,  love  may  leap  over,"  is  one 
which  every  sensible  observer  of  human  nature 
knows  to  be  violently  untrue.  That  untruth  has 
been  exposed  with  the  quietest  power,  the  serenest 
certainty,  by  Mr.  Galsworthy  in  The  Eldest  Son 
(1909).  But  in  1867  Robertson's  play  was  her- 
alded as  an  attempt  to  bring  the  drama  back  to 


170  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

the  life  of  its  own  day.  'The  whole  secret  of  its 
success  is  truth,"  wrote  a  contemporary  critic. 
And  so  confused  are,  to  this  day,  the  critical 
standards  of  the  English  drama  that  Robertson's 
impossible  sentimentalities  are  still  assigned  at 
times  -m  absolute  rather  than  a  merely  historical 
importance. 

In  this  condition  of  the  theatre — a  theatre  with- 
out truth,  without  art,  wholly  divorced  from  the 
consciousness  of  the  nation — it  was  but  natural 
that  the  greater  spirits  of  the  Georgian  and  Vic- 
torian periods  were  thrown  entirely  upon  the  tradi- 
tion of  Shakespeare.  Here  was  a  drama  that  had 
its  standards  and  its  technique.  It  was  a  forlorn 
hope  and  an  archaic  artifice  when  considered  with 
reference  to  any  real  theatre.  But  it  produced 
a  series  of  splendid  if  unplayable  masterpieces 
from  Shelley's  Cenci  (1819)  to  Swinburne's  Mary 
Stuart  (1881).  At  the  same  time  it  did  incal- 
culable harm.  It  became  an  idol  of  the  tribe. 
Anything  that  had  the  Elizabethan  semblance 
was  revered,  and  so  brilliant  and  incorruptible 
a  critic  as  Hazlitt,  pronounced  Sheridan  Knowles 
"the  first  tragic  poet  of  the  age."  Nor  was  this 
all.  The  contemporary  stage  was  despised,  not 
because  it  was  bad,  but  because  it  was  contem- 
porary ;  the  delusion  was  fostered  that  men  of  the 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       171 

nineteenth  century  could  express  themselves 
through  the  art  of  the  seventeenth.  Thus  orig- 
inated and  thus  grew  that  worship  of  Shakespeare, 
not  as  a  poet  and  seer,  but  as  a  dramatic  techni- 
cian, which  still,  upon  the  lips  of  the  learned  and 
the  guileless  menaces  the  reborn  drama  of  the  Eng- 
lish race. 

The  condition  of  the  English  theatre  imme- 
diately before  the  rise  of  the  contemporary  move- 
ment is  admirably  illustrated  by  the  efforts  which 
Tennyson  made  to  add  the  stage  to  his  other  con- 
quests. His  historical  plays  are  written  wholly 
in  the  Shakespearean  tradition.  Of  these  Becket 
(1884)  ig  probably  the  best.  Constant  elaborate 
changes  of  scene  within  the  act  unfit  the  play  for 
the  modern  stage;  verse  alternates  with  prose  for 
no  reason  but  that  it  is  so  in  Shakespeare:  the 
verse  is  Tennyson  disguising  his  voice;  the  prose, 
especially  in  the  speeches  of  Walter  Map,  is 
pseudo-Shakespearean  in  rhythm  and  in  richness 
of  fancy,  as  clever  and  as  useless  as  a  copy  of 
Latin  verses  by  a  gifted  under-graduate.  But 
the  poverty  of  the  age's  drama  appeared  even 
more  strikingly  when  Tennyson  attempted,  in 
The  Promise  of  May  (1882)  a  play  of  contem- 
porary rustic  life.  What  fable  did  this  great  poet 
select,  this  poet  who  had  so  wisely  and  nobly  ex- 


172  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

pressed  the  philosophical  movements  of  his  age, 
and  who  for  seventy  years  had  lived  observantly 
at  the  centre  of  national  life?  A  young  country 
girl  makes  a  mistake.  She  feels  that  she  must 
leave  her  home.  Her  aged  father  is  at  once 
stricken  blind.  The  base  seducer  is  a  free-thinker, 
an  impossible  creature  of  straw  and  bran.  At  the 
end  of  five  years  of  a  spotless  life  the  girl  comes 
home — to  die!  Why?  The  poor  girl's  brief 
happiness  did  not  even  have  the  consequence  that, 
in  a  base  and  intolerant  environment,  would  have 
made  life  hard.  In  brief,  the  greatest  English 
artist  of  his  day  lost  all  sense  of  reality,  of  jus- 
tice, of  anything  except  conventional  verbiage  and 
parochial  clap-trap  at  the  mere  touch  of  the  con- 
temporary stage.  One  cannot  but  be  grateful 
that  less  than  ten  years  were  to  elapse  before  the 
coming  of  a  dramatist  who,  whatever  one's  final 
estimate  of  him,  cleared  this  murky  and  musty, 
this  cruel,  stupid,  and  unreal  atmosphere  by  the 
simple  and  splendid  fact  that  he  "had  no  taste 
for  what  is  called  popular  art,  no  respect  for  pop- 
ular morality,  no  belief  in  popular  religion,  no 
admiration  for  popular  heroics." 

Gradually,  however,  the  English  drama  was 
forced  into  activity  if  the  theatre  was  to  survive 
at  all.  During  the  eighteen  hundred  and  eighties 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       173 

the  store  of  "well-made"  French  plays  was  ex- 
hausted, and  no  new  ones  were  forthcoming.  In 
1882  appeared  Becque's  Les  Corbeaux;  in  1885 
his  Parisienne;  in  1887  Antoine  opened  the  Thea- 
tre Libre;  the  French  drama  became  a  great  art 
in  touch  with  the  intimate  realities  of  its  age  and 
place,  and  could  no  longer  be  transported  across 
the  Channel.  And  it  was  then  that  appeared  the 
two  well-known  dramatists  of  the  transition  pe- 
riod of  the  modern  English  stage:  Henry  Arthur 
Jones  and  Arthur  Wing  Pinero. 

Almost  simultaneously  the  artistic  and  intel- 
lectual isolation  of  the  English  drama  was  broken. 
Ibsen's  A  Doll's  House  was  produced  by  Miss 
Janet  Achurch  in  1889,  and  1891  saw  the  opening 
of  the  Independent  Theatre  with  Ghosts.  It  was 
upon  the  boards  of  this  theatre  that  Bernard  Shaw 
opened  his  career  as  a  dramatist  in  1892  with 
Widowers'  Houses.  There  followed  more  than 
a  decade  of  turmoil  and  polemics.  A  group  of 
excellent  critics,  headed  by  Mr.  William  Archer, 
fought  brilliantly  and  learnedly  that  battle  for 
the  modern  drama  in  English  which  is  not  yet 
wholly  won.  On  the  side  of  creative  work,  how- 
ever, many  hopes  have  been  realised.  For  the 
first  five  years  of  the  twentieth  century  saw  the 
beginnings  of  the  incisive  and  subtle  dramatic 


174  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

work  of  Mr.  Granville  Barker  and,  in  the  person 
of  Mr.  John  Galsworthy,  at  last  gave  England  a 
modern  dramatist  of  the  rank,  if  not  of  the  stature, 
of  Ibsen  and  Hauptmann. 

II 

I  have  called  Jones  and  Pinero  the  dramatists 
of  a  transitional  period  and  a  transitional  method. 
The  necessity  for  this  distinction  has  never  been 
sufficiently  recognised,  for  the  unintelligent  ab- 
sence of  any  exact  critical  perceptions  still  clings 
to  the  discussions  and  the  study  of  the  English 
drama.  We  are  not  guilty  of  so  grave  a  confu- 
sion of  values  in  any  other  art.  We  are  very 
sensitively  aware  of  the  difference  between  the 
art  of  Wilkie  Collins  and  the  art  of  Mr.  Thomas 
Hardy.  It  is  quite  possible  for  intelligent  peo- 
ple to  read  The  Woman  in  White  with  a  certain 
avidity;  it  is  not  possible  for  them  to  confuse  the 
quality  or  permanence  of  that  pleasure  with  the 
quality  and  the  permanence  of  pleasure  given  them 
by  the  Wessex  novels.  Nor,  to  take  an  example 
nearer  home,  will  they  let  themselves  be  put  off 
with  The  Firing  Line  in  place  of  The  Custom  of 
the  Country;  with  Mrs.  Wiggs  of  the  Cabbage- 
Patch  in  place  of  Sister  Carrie.  In  the  drama 
that  discrimination  is  still  to  seek.  And  yet  the 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       175 

only  hope  for  the  drama  in  English  lies  in  the 
gradual  cultivation,  in  British  and  American  au- 
diences, of  that  instinctive  perception  by  which 
the  play-goers  of  Berlin  and  Paris  differentiate 
at  once  between  Lindau  and  Hauptmann  or  be- 
tween Sardou  and  Hervieu.  Until  we  come  to 
understand  with  the  utmost  delicacy  and 
thoroughness  the  chasm  that  divides  the  work  of 
Henry  Arthur  Jones  from  the  work  of  John  Gals- 
worthy we  shall  continue  to  witness  the  disheart- 
ening spectacle  of  epoch-making  runs  for  the 
decorative  sentimentalities  of  David  Belasco, 
while  a  play  like  Miss  Sowerby's  Rutherford 
and  Son  (1913)  scarcely  maintains  itself  for 
three  weeks  in  the  smallest  of  metropolitan  the- 
atres. 

I  hasten,  even  at  the  risk  of  quite  abandoning 
the  tone  of  history  for  that  of  polemics,  to  answer 
an  objection  that  is  constantly  made  to  the  es- 
tablishment of  rigid  standards  in  the  art  of  the 
theatre.  The  drama,  it  is  said,  is  a  popular  art; 
the  great  playwrights  of  the  past — Sophocles, 
Shakespeare,  Moliere — were  the  popular  play- 
wrights of  their  own  day.  This  is  historically 
true.  And  it  continues  true.  It  cannot,  indeed, 
be  said  that  Hauptmann,  Hervieu,  and  Schnitzler 
are  absolutely  the  most  popular  dramatists  of  con- 


176  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

temporary  Germany,  France  and  Austria.  The 
vast  complexity  of  modern  life  forbids  any  such 
absolute  popular  pre-eminence.  But  it  is  a  fact 
that  these  dramatists,  like  the  Molieres  and 
Shakespeares  of  the  past,  have  reached  the  au- 
diences of  their  time  and  country  widely  and  per- 
manently, and  can  show  the  modern  evidence  of 
that  success  in  wealth  and  power  and  prestige. 
To  reverse  this  test,  however,  and  apply  it  to 
English  and  American  conditions,  is  to  reduce  it 
to  the  absurd.  It  is  useless  to  waste  time  over  a 
critical  test  that  would  assign  any  place  in  the 
history  of  the  drama  to  Charles  Klein  or  rob  John 
Galsworthy  of  any  share  of  his  eminence  by 
reason  of  his  limited  success  upon  the  stage.  The 
explanation  of  the  apparent  paradox  of  this  state 
of  affairs  is  to  be  found  in  that  historical  aliena- 
tion of  the  English  audience  from  the  theatre,  of 
which  I  have  spoken,  and  of  the  consequent  loss 
of  all  standards  touching  the  drama  as  a  fine  art. 
The  audiences  of  Paris,  of  Vienna,  of  Weimar, 
have  a  secular  tradition  and  training  in  regard  to 
the  theatre;  the  heterogeneous  audiences  of  Lon- 
don and  New  York  have  none.  Hence  I  am 
sorry  to  see  several  of  our  American  universities 
striving  to  turn  out  dramatists  who  shall  be  able 
to  grapple  with  the  degrading  conditions  which 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       177 

popular  success  demands  to-day.  Does  not  the 
truer  function  of  our  academic  dealing  with  the 
drama  lie  in  the  formation  of  an  audience  which, 
by  its  homogeneous  spiritual  culture,  by  its  fine 
sense  of  values,  will  help  to  banish  the  scenic  dis- 
play and  the  melodrama  to  their  proper  place, 
and  give  the  Galsworthys  of  the  present  and  the 
future  that  hearing  which  Scandinavia  and  Ger- 
many, Austria  and  France,  have  given  to  the  great 
playwrights  of  their  modern  theatre? 

The  difference — for  there  is  a  difference — be- 
tween Mr.  Henry  Arthur  Jones  (b.  1851)  and 
such  a  man  as  Paul  Lindau  consists  in  this :  that 
Mr.  Jones  has  a  definite  historical  position  in  the 
development  of  the  modern  English  drama. 
What  his  position  is  he  has  himself  unconsciously 
defined  in  that  very  curious  and  instructive  book 
The  Renascence  of  the  English  "Drama  (1895). 
"The  dramatic  critics,"  Mr.  Jones  wrote,  "who 
have  advocated  realistic  principles  have  often  by 
their  admiration  of  mean,  perverse  things,  been 
antagonistic  to  the  permanent  advance  of  the  Eng- 
lish drama.  ...  But  the  epitaph — it  is  already 
written — on  all  this  realistic  business  will  be — clt 
does  not  matter  what  happens  in  kitchen  mid- 
dens/ '  To  such  realism  Mr.  Jones  opposes  a 
drama  that  is  to  have  "beauty,  mystery,  passion, 


178  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

imagination."  A  very  few  years  before,  how- 
ever, Mr.  Jones  had  written  as  follows:  "The 
fever  and  hurry  of  modern  London  life  .  .  .  have 
tended  to  spread  abroad  the  strangely  false  idea 
that  the  one  end  of  the  theatre  is — not  to  show 
us  our  lives — but  to  take  us  out  of  them!  .  .  . 
Its  complete  acceptance  by  authors  and  public  is 
the  grave  of  the  drama."  These  two  utterances 
clearly  betray  a  man  who  is  under  the  traditional 
spell  of  that  pseudo-idealism  which  has  never,  as 
a  matter  of  fact,  beheld  the  blinding  face  of  either 
beauty  or  mystery  but  who,  on  the  other  hand, 
has  had  occasional  perceptions  of  the  fact  that  the 
development  of  the  modern  drama  has  been  and 
must,  on  one  whole  side  of  its  activity,  continue  to 
be  in  the  direction  of  naturalism.  The  case  of 
Mr.  Jones  is  slightly  complicated  by  the  fact  that 
he  imagines  himself  a  mighty  radical.  No  doubt 
he  has  delivered  some  rough  and  ready  blows  at 
very  primitive  forms  of  human  stupidity,  as  in 
The  Triumph  of  the  Philistines  (1895).  As  an 
artist,  however,  he  is  pathetically  under  the  spell 
of  every  romantic  folly,  of  any  sentimental  de- 
lusion. 

It  is  possible  to  test  Mr.  Jones'  qualities  as  a 
playwright  and  observer  by  a  brief  analysis  of  two 
of  his  best-known  plays:  The  Case  of  Rebel- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       179 

lious  Susan   (1895)   an<^  Michael  and  His  Lost 
Angel  (1896). 

Lady  Susan  Harabin,  having  discovered  her 
husband's  infidelity,  refuses  to  be  soothed  or  pla- 
cated. She  feels  that  the  ordinary  facile  forgive- 
ness of  such  wrongs  will  not  meet  her  case.  De- 
spite the  protestations  of  her  aunt,  and  of  an  uncle, 
Sir  Richard  Kato,  who  plays  providence  through- 
out the  action,  she  leaves  her  home.  Ten  months 
have  elapsed  at  the  opening  of  the  second  act* 
During  that  period  Lady  Susan  has  had  an  affair 
of  the  heart  with  Lucien  Edensor,  though  she  did 
not,  in  all  likelihood,  go  to  the  length  of  her  orig- 
inal threat  of  vengeance  in  kind.  She  plans  to 
elope  with  Lucien  but  is  persuaded  by  Sir  Richard 
to  desist  and  to  come  to  him.  Before  the  begin- 
ning of  the  third  act  fifteen  more  months  have 
gone  by.  Lady  Sue  now  learns  that  Lucien's  life- 
long sorrow  for  her  loss  lasted  just  three  weeks, 
and  she  returns  to  Harabin  whose  regret  over  her 
desertion  seems  to  have  been  largely  caused  by  the 
trouble  and  expense  that  loose  women  inflicted  on 
him  during  his  temporary  widowerhood.  Now, 
wherein  lies  the  "case"  of  Susan,  and  what  does 
her  "rebellion"  come  to?  Does  she  believe  that 
infidelity  dissolves  the  marriage  bond?  Or  that 
it  gives  the  woman  an  equal  right?  Or  that  it 


i8o  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

is  tragic?  Or  that,  in  the  end,  it  doesn't  mat- 
ter? Does  she  return  to  her  husband  from  a 
sense  of  duty,  or  because  she  loves  him,  or  merely 
because  she  has  had  a  sentimental  disappoint- 
ment? The  feebleness  of  the  central  idea  is  only 
surpassed  by  the  incurable  externality  of  the 
characters  and  the  groaning  mechanism  of  the 
structure.  The  long  intervals  of  time  between 
the  acts  rob  these  episodes  of  any  concentrated 
effect ;  the  decisive  action  is  always  brought  about 
by  the  sermonising  and  wire-pulling  of  Sir  Richard 
Kato;  if  the  play  threatens,  at  any  moment,  to 
attain  a  shadow  of  unity  or  vigour — in  prance 
two  comic  paper  caricatures  named  Pybus  and 
Elaine  to  convulse  the  latter-day  groundlings  with 
their  sorry  tricks.  If  they  cannot  be  dragged  in, 
we  are  treated  to  an  Admiral  of  the  British  Navy 
who  has  excellent  possibilities  as  a  character  type 
but  who  must  needs  be  degraded  into  a  drunken 
buffoon.  The  difference  between  such  a  play  and 
one  by  Galsworthy  is  the  difference  between  a 
mechanical  toy  and  a  living  organism. 

Such  is  the  realism  of  Jones.  I  come  now 
to  his  "beauty,  mystery,  passion,  imagination." 

Michael  Feversham,  an  austere  Anglican  priest, 
forces  the  daughter  of  his  secretary,  who  has 
sinned,  into  public  confession  and  penitence.  At 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       181 

this  time  appears  in  his  parish  Mrs.  Audrie  Les- 
den,  half  angel,  half  demon,  who  tempts  Michael 
by  tempting  him  to  save  her.  Four  months  pass. 
Michael  is  in  his  desolate  hermitage  on  St.  Decu- 
men's  Island  to  watch  and  pray.  Audrie  man- 
ages to  be  left  on  the  island.  A  message  goes 
wrong;  no  boat  can  come  that  night;  Michael  and 
Audrie  fall  into  sin.  But  her  husband,  of  whose 
existence  Michael  was  ignorant,  appears.  They 
part.  A  year  passes.  Michael  has  restored  the 
ancient  minister  in  his  parish.  But  he  cannot 
strangle  "the  snake  of  his  sin"  and  on  the  day  of 
the  consecration  of  the  minister  confesses  that  sin 
to  his  people  and  leaves  them.  Ten  months  pass. 
Michael  is  in  a  convent  in  Italy,  about  to  be  re- 
ceived into  the  Roman  communion.  He  cannot 
find  peace  without  Audrie.  He  is  told  of  her  ill- 
ness. "She's  dying!"  he  exclaims,  and  Audrie 
walks  in  with  the  remark:  "I'm  afraid  I  am." 
And  proceeds  to  do  so. 

That  is,  quite  objectively  put,  the  fable  of  the 
play.  The  dialogue  is  written  in  this  fashion: 
"I  was  wondering  what  memories  are  stored  in 
that  white  forehead."  "Oh,  it's  cruel  to  dash 
the  cup  from  my  lips!"  In  Michael's  mono- 
logues Mr.  Jones  reaches  heights  of  this  quality 
that  would  put  Miss  Braddon  on  her  mettle.  But 


182  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

truly  appalling  is  the  sentimental  glue  into  which 
are  steeped,  in  the  first  and  last  acts,  the  silent 
and  solemn  mysteries  of  motherhood  and  death. 
It  is  hard  to  understand  how  any  audience  not 
wholly  devoid  of  spiritual  tone  could  ever  have 
endured  this  unmanly  desecration  of  our  last  sanc- 
tities. It  is  common  enough,  to  be  sure.  I  have 
a  vision  of  Audrie  Lesden,  exquisitely  gowned, 
dying  to  the  sweet,  sweet  strains  of  soft  music  on 
the  boards  of  the  old  Fourteenth  Street  Theatre 
in  New  York,  and  of  gum-chewing  shop-girls  dis- 
solved in  the  comfort  of  their  tears.  But  Michael 
and  His  Lost  Angel  is  taken  seriously  as  the  work 
of  a  serious  playwright.  Great  wits  praised  it 
when  it  appeared — Mr.  Archer  and  Mr.  Shaw; 
American  university  professors  interpret  it  in  their 
lecture  halls. 

I  can  find  nothing  in  Mr.  Jones'  later  plays  to 
mitigate  the  harshness  of  this  judgment.  His 
ideas  are  feeble,  his  structure  is  mechanical,  his 
dialogue  is  insincere.  His  characters  never,  in 
any  deep  and  intimate  sense,  speak  to  each  other, 
but  always  at  the  audience.  His  popularity  is 
inevitable;  his  serious  fame  is  a  menace  to  the 
English  drama. 

Sir  Arthur  Wing  Pinero  (b.  1855),  the  second 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND        183 

figure  in  the  transitional  phase  of  the  modern 
drama  in  England,  has  shown  a  far  higher  degree 
of  flexibility  as  an  artist  than  Mr.  Jones.  I  ven- 
ture to  call  in  question  a  corresponding  inner  de- 
velopment. For  though  he  has  written  many  ap- 
parently serious  plays  since  his  Court  Theatre 
farces  and  The  Profligate  (1889),  his  career,  for 
the  moment,  culminates  in  The  "Mind  the  Paint" 
Girl  (1912). 

His  very  early  plays  are  harmless  and  negli- 
gible: The  Magistrate  (1885)  is  amusing 
enough;  Sweet  Lavender  (1888)  is  a  sentimental 
hodge-podge  in  which  the  poor  working-girl  turns 
out  to  be  the  rich  man's  daughter.  One  would 
not  dream  of  discussing  work  of  this  quality  in 
any  art  except  the  art  of  the  English  drama.  No 
history  of  English  literature  is  likely  to  discuss 
the  novels  of  'The  Duchess."  But  Mr.  John 
Hare's  production  of  The  Profligate  (1889)  at  the 
New  Garrick  Theatre  with  Mr.  Forbes  Robertson 
in  the  title  role  has  been  said  to  mark  an  epoch  in 
the  history  of  the  modern  drama.  The  Profligate, 
however,  is  really  a  more  lamentable  because  a 
more  pretentious  play  than  the  early  farces  and 
melodramas.  It  is  the  old-fashioned  story  of  be- 
trayal with  all  its  false  and  foolish  moral  arro- 
gance, with  the  phantastic  insistence  on  sex  in- 


184  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

stinct  as  the  exclusive  property  of  one  sex  and  as 
being,  in  that  sex,  a  monstrous  perversity  which 
slays  its  shuddering  and  unwilling  victims.  The 
technique  of  the  play  represents  the  long  arm  of 
coincidence  as  the  arm  of  a  skilled  prestidigitator. 
It  must  be  an  extraordinarily  primitive  audience 
that  is  taken  in  by  the  various  reappearances  of 
Janet  Preece  and  the  discovery  of  the  real  culprit 
in  the  third  act. 

At  the  end  of  four  years,  however,  years 
marked  by  the  introduction  of  Ibsen  into  England, 
by  the  founding  of  the  Independent  Theatre  and 
by  the  appearance  of  Mr.  Shaw,  Pinero  produced 
The  Second  Mrs.  Tanqueray.  The  absolute 
value  of  that  play  is,  clearly,  not  of  the  highest. 
The  catastrophe  which  inheres  so  closely  in  the 
characters  is  brought  about  by  an  unlikely  and 
violent  coincidence.  And  that  coincidence  is  ef- 
fected because  Pinero  had  not  the  fine  artistic 
courage  to  leave  Aubrey  and  Paula  Tanqueray 
merely  with  a  recognition  of  their  real  tragedy — 
the  irrevocableness  of  the  past.  But  intellec- 
tually The  Second  Mrs.  Tanqueray  is  in  a  dif- 
ferent world  from  that  of  The  Profligate.  The 
outlook  upon  life  is  true  and  fearless  within  the 
given  limits  of  merely  social  morality;  a  free  and 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       185 

human  justice  is  dealt  out  in  the  characterisation 
of  Paula  Tanqueray  herself. 

The  Notorious  Mrs.  Ebb  smith  (1894)  though 
less  effective  as  a  whole  marks  a  still  further  ad- 
vance in  artistic  and  intellectual  sincerity.  The 
situation  of  that  deadly  compromise  which  Lucas 
Cleeve  hesitates  to  reject,  and  which  would  have 
reduced  Agnes  Ebbsmith  from  a  free  personality 
in  a  free  union  to  a  common  wanton — that  situa- 
tion is  finely  conceived  and  embodied  without 
cheap  concessions  to  the  mechanism  of  intrigue. 
Equally  sound  is  the  plea  of  Sybil  Cleeve  in  the 
last  act  and  her  immediate  repudiation  of  its  dis- 
grace. Indeed  Pinero's  progress  in  the  projec- 
tion of  character  was  very  notable  during  these 
years  and  approved  itself  especially  in  the  rela- 
tions between  John  and  Olive  Allingham  in  his 
next  play:  The  Benefit  of  the  Doubt  ( 1895).  ^ 
is  unfortunate  that  the  whole  action  of  this  in- 
teresting work  hinges  upon  a  conversation  over- 
heard through  an  elaborate  bit  of  technical 
trickery. 

The  level  of  these  three  plays  Pinero  was  un- 
able to  sustain.  By  perceptible  gradations  from 
play  to  play  he  sank  once  more  to  the  shoddy  and 
external  intrigue  of  The  Gay  Lord  Quex  (1899). 


186  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

Then,  gathering  his  powers  with  an  almost  visible 
effort,  he  produced  his  most  elaborate  and  am- 
bitious drama  in  Iris  ( 1901 ).  The  merits  of  that 
piece  are  solid  and  obvious.  Iris,  as  a  character, 
is  incontestably  alive  and  permanent;  the  portrait 
of  Maldonado  is  earnestly  attempted  and  vividly 
elaborated;  the  last  interview  between  Lawrence 
Trenwith  and  Iris  is  not  without  true  pathos ;  the 
ending  is,  for  once,  unafraid  of  its  own  inherent 
necessities.  But  the  base  of  all  this  excellent 
structure  is  built  on  stubble.  For  the  drama  is 
that  art  in  which  men  shall  go  through  the  recog- 
nisable gestures  of  their  mortal  fate  driven  by  an 
inner  impulse,  not  by  the  tug  and  thrust  of  the 
deviser's  clever  mechanism.  Now  the  action  of 
\lris  is  wholly  conditioned  on  two  external  acci- 
dents and  one  piece  of  shameless  trickery.  The 
impetus  that  starts  the  play  is  the  unusual  will 
left  by  Iris'  husband ;  the  turning  point  of  the  ac- 
tion comes  fortuitously  from  without,  through  the 
absconding  of  Archibald  Kane ;  to  force  the  catas- 
trophe Iris  must  write  a  letter,  tear  it  up,  scatter 
the  fragments  on  the  floor,  and  fail  to  observe 
Maldonado  gather  them  in  her  very  presence. 
Thus  only  does  he  learn  of , her  apparent  treachery 
and  returns  to  drive  her  out  into  the  streets. 
Iris  was  again  followed  by  a  rapid  decline  in 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       187 

Pinero' s  work.  In  1904  appeared  Letty,  mawk- 
ish, melodramatic  and  unreal;  in  1905  A  Wife 
Without  a  Smile  which  is  farce  at  its  most  trivial. 
But  the  best  quality  in  Pinero  is  his  ever  resur- 
gent ambition  which  wrung  from  him  a  new  group 
of  serious  attempts  at  the  art  and  not  at  the  trade 
of  the  drama.  He  reaches  his  highest  point  in 
The  Thunderbolt  (1909).  It  is  still,  to  be  sure, 
the  old  Pinero.  The  action  of  the  play  is  still 
based  on  the  destruction  of  a  will.  But  at  last 
the  exposition  in  the  excellent  first  act  is  of  char- 
acter rather  than  of  incident,  the  several  members 
of  the  Mortimore  family  are  not  only  well  ob- 
served but  projected  without  caricature;  the  con- 
fession of  James  Mortimore  in  the  closing  act  is  a 
dramatic  solution  for  once  conditioned  in  the  un- 
contorted  nature  of  men  and  things. 

But  is  this  the  real  Pinero?  Or  is  it  the  crea- 
tor of  Lavender,  of  Letty,  of  Lily  Parradell  in 
The  "Mind  the  Paint"  Girl  (1912)?  Is  it  pos- 
sible to  take  quite  seriously  the  analysis  of  Paula 
Tanqueray,  the  defence  of  Agnes  Ebbsmith,  the 
judgment  upon  Iris  Bellamy,  since  Pinero  re- 
turns unceasingly  to  a  flattery  of  the  coarsest  de- 
lusions and  the  most  worthless  tastes?  No  one 
doubts  that  there  are  decent  girls  in  the  chorus, 
girls  with  their  own  proper  notions  of  honesty  and 


i88  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

self-respect.  But  is  it  not  pandering  to  the 
vainest  of  romantic  follies  to  base  a  play  upon  the 
promise  of  married  happiness  between  a  high- 
minded  and  sensitive  gentleman  and  a  girl  whose 
social  instincts  would  have  driven  him  to  despera- 
tion, the  very  thought  of  whose  mother  would 
have  driven  him  to  drink?  I  can  but  point  once 
more  to  Mr.  Galsworthy's  treatment  of  the  same 
theme  in  The  Eldest  Son  (1909).  Before  the 
plain  nobility  of  truth  Pinero's  devices  shrink 
aside  and  lie  prone  with  the  other  lumber  of  the 
green-room  and  the  property  man. 

In  reality  it  is  not  difficult  to  sum  up  Pinero's 
character  as  a  dramatic  artist.  His  is  a  conven- 
Itional  mind  under  the  impact  of  a  world  in  the 
^throes  of  moral  protest  and  readjustment;  his,  a 
conventional  technique  under  the  impact  of  a 
nobler  and  a  plainer  art.  In  the  direction  of  that 
finer  art  his  progress  has  been  less  than  moderate. 
With  the  intellectual  dilemma  he  has  dealt  by 
pleading  for  certain  exemptions  from  the  full 
rigour  of  the  social  law.  Except  in  Iris  he  has  al- 
ways treated  the  problem  of  sex  as  one  of  social, 
rather  than  of  personal  reality  and  conflict.  '  In 
that  emphasis  upon  the  external  social  order  his  art 
is  akin  to  the  art  of  the  French  stage,  but  he  lacks 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       189 

the  latter' s  passion,  its  keen  intelligence,  its  con- 
viction and  its  style.  The  extraordinarily  high 
position  which  he  holds  in  the  world  of  the  Eng- 
lish drama  is  sure  to  decline  rapidly  with  the  in- 
troduction of  such  critical  standards  as  are  unhes- 
itatingly applied  in  every  other  department  of 
imaginative  literature. 

Ill 

A  brief  and  curious  interlude  in  the  history  of 
the  modern  English  drama  is  furnished  by  the 
comedies  of  Oscar  Wilde  (1856-1900).  Struc- 
turally these  comedies  are  frankly  of  the  old,  triv- 
ial, intriguing  kind.  Yet  there  is  a  very  vital 
difference  between  The  Profligate  on  the  one  hand, 
and  Lady  Windermere's  Fan  ( 1893)  on  the  other. 
Pinero^  appeals  topur  sense  of  moral  sinceritjLarul 
our  sense  o?  trut^  only  lojnsult  th^m:  hk_diaz 
logue  apes  thejBjgeech  of  man  and  is  but  the  ver- 
biage of  a  degraded  stageT  IrTaTword,  The  Profli- 
gate  is  supposed  to  be  a  picture  of  life.  Lady 
Windermerefs  Fan  makes  no  such  pretensions. 
The  play  seeks  neither  to  compete  with  life  nor, 
in  any  close  sense,  to  interpret  it.  To  assail  the 
comedy  of  Wilde  for  a  want  of  reality  were  like 
taking  a  tuberose  to  task  for  not  being  an  oak- 


190  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

tree.  The  pleasure  which  the  flower  gives  is  brief 
and  a  trifle  enervating,  but  it  is  genuine  of  its 
kind.1 

Wilde  succeeds  in  lifting  his  comedies  out  of 
life — not,  to  be  sure,  above  it — by  the  style  of  his 
dialogue.  The  noblest  dramatic  dialogue  is  that 
which  creates  the  illusion  of  human  speech;  the 
basest  that  which  pretends  to  create  such  an  illu- 
sion and  gives  us  the  sentimental  formulas  of 
melodrama.  Wilde  neither  succeeds  nor  fails 
upon  such  terms.  His  dialogue,  like  Congreve's, 
is  an  exercise  in  style.  And  for  such  an  exercise 
he  was  admirably  fitted  by  gifts  and  training. 
He  has  the  icy  glitter  of  sheer  wit,  the  sparkling 
perfection  of  phrase,  the  ringing  balance  of 
rhythm.  Nor  is  this  all.  He  has  moments  of  a 
larger  and  more  subtly  modulated  eloquence.  As- 
suredly the  plea  of  Mrs.  Arbuthnot  in  the  last  act 
of  A  Woman  of  No  Importance  (1893)  is  arti- 
ficial, and  so  is  Goring's  reproof  of  Lady  Chiltern 
in  An  Ideal  Husband  (1895).  But  the  artifice 
is  the  legitimate  artifice  of  fine  oratory — calcu- 
lated, of  course,  and  consciously  effective,  but 
with  a  glow  of  real  conviction,  a  throb  of  true 

i  This  is,  of  course,  but  the  old  plea  of  Charles  Lamb  for 
the  comedy  of  the  Restoration.  Wilde,  I  think,  may  legiti- 
mately claim  it  for  himself. 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND        191 

feeling  under  the  external  flash  and  ring  of  its 
periods. 

I  have  called  the  brilliant  comedy  of  Wilde  an 
interlude  in  the  history  of  the  modern  English 
drama.  It  is  also  a  prelude  to  the  greater  comedy 
of  Mr.  Shaw.  For  the  popular  impression  that 
Wilde's  wit  is  merely  affected  nonsense  is  the 
result  of  apocryphal  anecdote,  and  of  Mr. 
Hichen's  dazzling  satire  The  Green  Carnation 
(189?).  Mr.  Shaw,  I  take  it,  would  not  repu- 
diate, as  at  least  prophetic,  the  sayings  of  Lord 
Illingworth  in  A  Woman  of  No  Importance: 
"Women  represent  the  triumph  of  matter  over 
mind."  'The  history  of  woman  is  the  history  of 
the  worst  form  of  tyranny  the  world  has  ever 
known — the  tyranny  of  the  weak  over  the 
strong."  In  An  Ideal  Husband,  moreover,  Wilde 
practises  a  subjective  type  of  stage-direction 
which  is  Shavian  or  nothing.  "They  are  types 
of  exquisite  fragility.  Watteau  would  have 
loved  to  paint  them."  Sir  Robert  Chiltern  "is 
not  popular.  Few  personalities  are."  And  is 
not  Phipps  the  butler  an  adumbration,  at  least,  of 
that  remarkable  class  of  serving-men  to  which  be- 
long Balmy  Walters  and  the  redoubtable  Enry 
Straker? 


192  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

Wilde's  four  comedies  are  of  very  unequal 
value.  Lady  Windermere's  Fan  is  saved  from 
melodrama  and  triviality  only  by  the  artistic  dis- 
tinction of  its  style.  The  Importance  of  Being 
Earnest  (1895)  ls  mere  farce,  though  of  an  airy 
and  not  quite  graceless  kind.  A  Woman  of  No 
Importance  would  be  almost  as  purely  a  conversa- 
tion as  Shaw's  Getting  Married,  could  one  snap 
off  the  brief  climax  of  each  act.  His  best  play 
is  An  Ideal  Husband.  A  just  and  powerful  idea 
is  justly  and  powerfully  developed.  The  small 
Chinese  puzzle  of  intrigue  in  the  second  act  is 
carried  off  by  the  unfailing  brilliancy  and  vigour 
of  the  dialogue.  It  is  an  artificial  comedy 
touched  with  reflection  and  imagination.  In  its 
necessarily  almost  obsolete  kind  it  is  a  minor  but 
authentic  masterpiece. 

IV 

Mr.  George  Bernard  Shaw  (b.  1856)  is  a 
writer  of  comedy  with  a  tragic  cry  in  his  soul. 
In  the  Middle  Ages  he  would  have  been  a  great 
saint,  appalled  at  the  gracelessness  of  men's  hearts, 
militant  for  the  kingdom  of  God.  To-day  he  is 
a  playwright,  appalled  at  the  muddleheadedness 
of  the  race,  a  fighter  for  the  conquest  of  reason 
over  unreason,  of  order  over  disorder,  of  economy 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND        193 

over  waste.  His  mind  abhors  the  frantic  contra- 
dictions at  the  root  of  things;  it  cries  out  like  a 
hurt  animal  over  the  blind  mysticisms  by  which 
we  are  swayed.  Many  reformers  have  attacked 
opinions,  institutions,  laws.  Mr.  Shaw  attacks 
the  emotional  basis  on  which  Western  civilisation 
is  founded.  In  his  moments  of  mere  eccentricity 
he  may  jeer  at  science.  But  he  is  himself  the  last 
inevitable  corollary  of  the  scientific  spirit.  And 
the  fact  that,  holding  the  views  which  he  does,  he 
has  not  been  silenced  as  a  madman,  stamps  him 
as  a  portent. 

I  have  already  mentioned  his  moments  of  mere 
eccentricity.  They  occur  in  states  of  wild,  in- 
tellectual exuberance  when  he  applies  his  method 
with  fierce  and  joyful  indiscriminateness.  But  let 
no 

"comfortable  moles  whom  what  they  do 
Teaches  the  limits  of  the  just  and  true," 

flatter  themselves  that  Bernard  Shaw  is  a  jester. 
His  theories  and  his  rebellions  may  rise  up,  to- 
morrow, in  living  form,  and  obliterate  those  who 
had  doubted  his  fierce  earnestness. 

As  becomes  a  child  of  the  scientific  spirit,  Shaw 
is  a  naturalist;  he  wants  the  truth.  Only  he  does 
not  see  his  truth  in  the  garbs  which  historical 


194  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

civilisation  has  thrown  over  us.  He  wants  man 
naked,  stripped  of  his  false  pretensions,  his  dig- 
nified gestures,  his  romantic  illusions.  He  wants 
to  know  how  the  stark  soul  looks  when  it  ceases 
to  mutter  its  tribal  incantations.  Hell,  in  the 
Shavian  gospel,  is  the  home  of  sham.  In  Heaven 
the  austere  nakedness  of  truth  is  vigilant. 

Hence  his  method  of  attacking  things  is  not 
to  show  them,  but  to  show  them  up;  not  to  de- 
scribe them,  but  to  tell  the  truth  about  them — 
the  merciless,  devastating  truth.  And  he  has  un- 
dertaken to  tell  the  truth  primarily  about  three 
things:  Poverty,  war  and  love. 

His  attacks  on  poverty  and  war  are  his  rights, 
as  a  confirmed  modern,  a  socialist,  and  hence — 
though  he  may  repudiate  so  old-fashioned  a  term 
— a  utilitarian.  For  poverty  is,  in  very  truth,  the 
root  of  all  evil  in  that  it  makes  men  slaves.  It 
is  only  an  occasional  Mrs.  Warren  who  can  even 
appear  to  rise  from  that  abyss.  The  vast  ma- 
jority of  human  creatures  are  simply  stamped, 
face  downward,  into  the  mire.  Nor  is  that 
slavery  one  to  a  wiser  power,  a  more  luminous 
purpose,  but  quite  starkly  to  hunger,  cold  and 
dirt.  Hence  until  society  has  conquered  the  sin 
and  the  disgrace  of  poverty,  all  other  efforts  and 
ideals  of  a  collective  character  are  futile.  His 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND        195 

attack  on  war  is  less  interesting  and  vital.  For  the 
glamour  of  war  seemed  to  him  to  be  becoming 
daily  less  real  to  our  civilisation  as  a  whole.  To 
exhibit  the  typical  romance  of  war,  he  went  to  a 
fairly  primitive  people  living  amid  fairly  primi- 
tive conditions.  (Arms  and  The  Man.}  His 
theory  has  been  invalidated  by  the  sternest  of  ar- 
guments. 

There  remains  his  heroic  onslaught  upon  the 
sex  morality  of  Christendom.  That  onslaught 
may  be  formulated  somewhat  as  follows:  The 
theory  of  your  society  is  that  marriage  is  sacred, 
that  it  ought  to  be  permanent,  and  that  it  is  the 
necessary  expiation  of  every  offence  against  the 
ideal  virtue  of  chastity.  The  impulse  of  sex  is, 
as  a  matter  of  hard  fact,  transitory  in  its  nature 
and  impersonal.  Its  occurrence  between  two  hu- 
man beings  is  no  ground  for  supposing  that  their 
permanent  union  will  fulfil  any  of  the  nobler 
purposes  of  human  life.  Hence  by  making  di- 
vorce difficult  and  indecent  you  condemn  great 
numbers  of  men  and  women  to  a  corroding  and 
corrupting  slavery;  by  inculcating  the  false  no- 
tion that  the  transient  impulse  of  passion  must  be 
paid  for  by  a  lifetime  of  responsibility,  you  force 
into  existence,  historically  and  actually,  the  trade 
of  prostitution  with  all  its  attendant  evils  of  deg- 


196  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

radation  and  disease.  Finally,  by  branding  extra- 
marital motherhood  with  shame  you  deprive  many 
women  of  the  right  to  motherhood  and,  once  more, 
pander  to  prostitution  by  driving  men  into  the 
arms  of  women  whose  trade  forbids  the  bearing 
of  children.  For  it  is  a  psychological  fact  that 
the  more  highly  organised  a  man  is,  the  more  does 
he  dread  the  deflection  of  his  energies  from  ideal 
to  merely  procreative  and  domestic  ends ;  the  more 
thoroughly  a  woman  is  endowed  with  the  pas- 
sion of  motherhood,  the  less  is  her  continuous  need 
of  the  conventional  husband.  In  so  far  as  that 
need  is,  at  present,  an  economic  one,  it  is  dis- 
graceful both  to  the  individual  and  to  society, 
since  it  means  the  repudiation  of  the  social  value 
of  that  function  on  which  the  very  existence  of 
the  race  depends. 

Freedom,  flexibility  and  health  in  the  relations 
of  the  sexes — these  are  the  ideals  that  Shaw  has 
most  at  heart.  These  are  the  theme  of  his  cen- 
tral work  Man  and  Superman  (1903),  of  Get- 
ting Married  (1908),  and,  explicitly  or  im- 
plicitly, of  passages  and  episodes  in  nearly  all  his 
plays.  Now  Shaw,  I  must  repeat,  is  a  utilitarian. 
He  has  a  scorching  "contempt  for  belles-lettres," 
for  art  that  is  not  didactic,  above  all,  for  happi- 
ness. Like  all  utilitarians  he  repudiates  a  multi- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       197 

plicity  of  final  values.  It  is  not  enough  for  him 
that  a  thing  is  good;  it  must  be  good — for  some- 
thing else.  And  it  is  Shaw's  conception  that  a 
new  order  of  relationship  between  the  sexes  will 
breed  a  nobler  race — that  race  of  supermen, 
namely,  which  will  repair  the  miserable  failures 
of  our  democracy,  which  will  stamp  out  the  crimes 
of  war  and  poverty,  the  disgraces  of  slavery  and 
disease.  To  this  end  has  the  Life  Force  been  in 
travail  thus  far  in  vain.  But  the  Life  Force 
(which  reminds  one  not  a  little  of  Spencer's  Ab- 
solute that  wells  up  in  consciousness)  is  at  last 
becoming  purposeful  and  self-directing  in  the 
brain  of  philosophic  man.  Thus  man  (and  here 
we  touch  the  Pragmatists  and  the  Bergsonians) 
helps  to  build,  up  a  universe  whose  incessant  as- 
piration is  "to  higher  organisation,  wider,  deeper, 
intenser  self-consciousness,  and  clearer  self-under- 
standing." 

The  trouble  with  this  metaphysic  is  that  it 
suits  only  a  world  of  Shavians  to  whom  "the  true 
joy  of  life"  is  "the  being  used  for  a  purpose  recog- 
nised by  yourself  as  a  mighty  one;  the  being  thor- 
oughly worn  out  before  you  are  thrown  on  the 
scrap-heap;  the  being  a  force  of  nature."  Need 
I  say  that  that  ideal  has  its  own  valour  and  nobil- 
ity? But  we  cannot  all  be  social  reformers  or 


198  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

martyrs  to  moral  passion:  To  many  of  us  the 
development  of  a  free  personality  in  a  free  uni- 
verse will  always  seem  the  only  ideal  that  can 
make  life  worth  living.  We  must  be  able  to  be- 
lieve that  our  efforts  in  art  and  thought  have  a 
measure,  at  least,  of  final  validity,  and  our  free 
personalities  an  enduring  relation  to  something 
in  which  "there  is  no  variableness  neither  shadow 
of  turning."  With  a  burning  recognition  of  hu- 
man suffering  and  injustice  we  refuse  to  be 
earthly  socialists  because  we  dare  not  be  cosmic 
socialists. 

But  indeed  I  suspect  Mr.  Shaw  himself  of  a 
splendid  defection.  He  pleads  with  too  personal 
a  passion  for  the  sexual  liberation  of  mankind. 
^He  knows  with  too  intense  a  knowledge  that  "of 
a^  human  struggles  there  is  none  so  treacherous 
and  remorseless  as  the  struggle  between  the  artist 
man  and  the  mother  woman.  Which  shall  use 
up  the  other?  That  is  the  issue  between  them." 
And  he  is  himself  that  artist  man,  attributing  to 
the  efforts  of  his  creative  thought  a  spiritual  im- 
port which  transcends  the  ideals  of  the  collectivist 
reformer  and  allies  him  to  that  company  of  free 
personalities — heroes  in  the  Carlylian  sense — 

"Whose  having  lived  gives  meaning  to  all  life."    '•- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       199 

I  seem  scarcely,  so  far  to  have  been  discussing 
a  dramatist  at  all.  But  he  must  be  a  poor  crea- 
ture indeed  who  is  not  stirred  by  the  luminous 
sagacity,  the  daring  thought,  the  intellectual  pas- 
sion of  Bernard  Shaw.  It  is  not  necessary  to 
agree  with  him  at  any  point.  Or,  it  is  possible, 
as  in  my  own  case,  to  agree  with  him  in  a  hundred 
details  most  heartily  and  not  at  all  in  his  ultimate 
conclusions  or  his  final  aims.  It  is  possible,  in  a 
w^ord,  to  do  anything  but  ignore  him. 

What  must  be  abundantly  clear  is  that  the 
methods  of  so  valorous  a  thinker  cannot  be  cheap 
or  conventional.  With  intrigue,  with  the  bluster 
of  external  action,  he  has  nothing  to  do.  He  is 
bent  upon  a  much  graver  business.  The  struc- 
ture of  his  plays,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  corresponds 
to  the  development  of  thoughts;  thoughts  are 
dramatised;  the  evolution  of  his  plays  is  purely 
intellectual.  This  does  not  mean  that  he'  has 
not,  at  will,  a  sufficiently  firm  grasp  of  the  ma- 
terial world,  or  that  he  shirks,  in  his  best  plays, 
the  concrete  external  factors  of  human  life.  In! 
that  respect,  likewise,  he  is  a  naturalist  to  the 
backbone. 

Not  so,  however,  in  his  dialogue.  That  is  al- 
ways Shavian,  even  when  the  speech  of  his  char- 


200  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

acters  is  scrupulously  naturalistic  in  its  merely 
formal  aspect.  The  style  is  always  the  same — 
the  bare,  sinewy,  rapid,  but  undeviatingly  prosaic 
eloquence  of  Bernard  Shaw.  It  has  light  but  no 
heat,  and  the  light  is  always  sharp  and  challeng- 
ing, never  radiant  or  lustrous. 

And  this  unflagging  energy  of  style  brings  me 
at  last  to  the  people  who  are  supposed  to  use  it — 
the  characters  of  Bernard  Shaw.  Into  that  as- 
tonishing assemblage  have  stolen  a  few  ordinary 
mortals:  Candida's  father,  Crampton,  in  Tou 
'Never  Can  Tell;  Roebuck  Ramsden  in  Man  and 
Superman;  the  General  in  Getting  Married. 
The  rest,  even  the  humblest,  such  as  Bill  Walker 
in  Major  Barbara,  or  Blanco  Posnet  in  the  play 
that  shows  him  up,  have  the  extraordinary  ca- 
pacity of  getting  outside  of  their  own  skins.  I, 
am  aware  of  the  crudeness  of  my  image.  But 
Shaw  wants  no  "moral  attitudes,"  he  wants  truth; 
he  wants  "actual  humanity  instead  of  doctrinaire 
romanticism."  Men  and  women,  however,  live 
and  move  and  have  their  being  in  these  moral 
attitudes;  their  psychical  life  is  drenched  in  this 
doctrinaire  romanticism.  By  being  shown  as  con- 
stantly capable  of  stripping  off  the  very  texture 
of  their  inner  life,  of  living  an  uninterrupted' 
series  of  moments  characterised  by  the  highest 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       201 

Shavian  insight  and  sagacity,  they  cease  to  be  in- 
dependent creatures  at  all,  and  become  the  mere 
images  of  men  as  reflected  back  by  the  hard, 
bright,  unshadowed  surface  of  their  creator's  mind. 
The  truth  is  that  human  beings  in  this  very  hu- 
man world  are  sadly  and  even  consistently  mud- 
dleheaded.  The  real  Mrs.  Warren  would  have 
been  able  to  build  up  her  business,  never  its  phi- 
losophy; the  real  Candida  would  have  made  Can- 
dida's choice  in  everlasting  ignorance  of  Morrel's 
weakness  and  of  Eugene's  strength;  the  real  Ann 
Whitfield  would  never  have  owned  up  to  methods 
of  which  she  was  sublimely  unconscious;  the  real 
Mrs,  George  was  but  a  vulgar  profligate. 

It  will  now  be  clear  why  I  stressed  the  philoso- 
phy of  Bernard  Shaw.  This  remarkable  writer 
is  not,  in  the  stricter  sense,  a  creative  artist  at  all. 
The  sharp  contemporaneousness  and  vividness  of 
his  best  settings  deceives  us.  ?  His  plays  are 
the  theatre  of  the  analytic  intellect,  not  the  drama 
of  man.  They  are  a  criticism  of  life,  not  in  the 
sense  of  Arnold,  but  in  the  plain  and  literal  one. 
His  place  is  with  Lucian  rather  than  with 
Moliere.  I  do  not  mean  that  his  dialogues  do 
not  play.  They  play  admirably  and  they  will 
be  played  increasingly  as  our  English-speaking 
audiences  grow  in  critical  maturity.  Few  men 


202  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

will  assent  to  his  views,  but  fewer  still  will  care 
to  deny  themselves  one  of  the  most  vivid  and 
tonic  experiences  of  our  age — an  intimate  contact 
with  that  brave,  that  ruthless,  that  luminous  mind. 


If  Mr.  Granville  Barker's  activity  as  a  produc- 
ing manager  accounts  for  the  fewness  of  his  plays, 
it  is  an  activity  to  be  sincerely  regretted.  For  his 
contribution  to  the  modern  English  drama  is  one 
of  great  originality  and  native  power,  even  though 
I  seem  to  discern  in  his  work  the  meeting  of  two 
important  influences.  Mr.  Barker's  excellent 
translation  of  Schnitzler's  Anatol  points  to  one  of 
these  influences,  an  hundred  bits  of  internal  evi- 
dence point  to  the  other,  that  of  Mr.  Shaw.  One 
may  go  very  far  astray  in  analysing  the  conscious 
artistic  processes  of  so  close  a  contemporary.  I 
venture  the  theory,  however,  that  Mr.  Barker  has 
studied  the  structural  technique  of  the  German 
naturalists  and  has  determined  to  carry  their 
method  the  one  possible  step  further.  That  is, 
at  all  events,  consciously  or  unconsciously,  what 
he  has  done. 

This  technical  procedure  may  be  illustrated  by 
observing  the  "curtains"  of  the  eminent  natural- 
istic artists,  of  Hauptmann  or  of  Galsworthy. 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       203 

In  Rose  Bernd,  for  instance,  or  in  The  Eldest 
Son  each  act  ends  with  an  observation  which,  in- 
evitable and  unstudied  though  it  be,  marks  by  its 
special  note  and  tone,  a  pause,  and  a  stage  in  the 
spiritual  rhythm  of  the  action.  That  dramatic 
rhythm  is  gained  by  a  series  of  exquisitely  un- 
obtrusive emphases  upon  the  significant,  and  by 
silent  omission  of  the  non-significant.  In  The 
Madras  House  (1909),  however,  which  repre- 
sents the  latest  point  in  Mr.  Barker's  develop- 
ment, the  rhythm  of  action — emphasis  and  sup- 
pression in  the  service  of  unity  of  effect — is  aban- 
doned. Each  act  ends  in  the  midst  of  a  conver- 
sation; so  does  the  whole  play,  and  the  stage- 
direction  remarks:  "She  doesn't  finish,  for  really 
there  is  no  end  to  the  subject."  All  of  which 
means  that  Mr.  Barker  seeks  to  follow  the  broken 
rhythm  of  life — the  helpless  swaying  hither  and 
thither  of  human  talk,  the  pause  of  embarrass- 
ment or  sudden  blankness  which  leads  to  irrele- 
vant changes  of  subject.  In  addition,  he  seeks 
to  illustrate,  as  in  the  second  act  of  The  Madras 
House,  the  fact  that  human  affairs  run  parallel  to 
each  other  and  have  often  no  connection  except 
the  accidental  one  of  a  single  man  or  woman's  be- 
ing a  participant  in  each.  Thus  the  scandal 
among  the  employes  of  the  house  and  the  sale  of 


204  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

the  house  to  the  American,  Eustice  P.  State,  have 
nothing  in  common  except  that  Philip  Madras 
must,  necessarily,  give  his  attention  to  both. 
Each,  to  be  sure  has,  upon  reflection,  a  bearing 
upon  the  theme  of  the  play  which  is,  once  more, 
•  the  problem  of  sex.  But  from  the  aspect  of  fable 
and  structure  The  Madras  House  marks  a  point  at 
which  the  avoidance  of  artifice  touches  the  nega- 
tion of  form. 

Negation  of  form !  Having  written  the  words, 
I  am  almost  ready  to  retract  them.  For  in  truth 
The  Madras  House  is  one  of  the  most  fascinating 
of  modern  plays.  Its  strange  inconsequentialities 
of  structure,  its  act  endings  which  trail  off  into 
a  natural  silence  or  simply  blend  with  the  cease- 
less hum  of  life  seem  but  to  sharpen  the  peculiar 
tang  of  art  and  thought,  extremely  keen  and  per- 
sonal, that  exhales  from  the  play. 

The  thesis  of  The  Madras  House  is  no  less  ar- 
resting than  its  form.  The  gradual  emancipation 
of  woman  in  the  West  has  led  to  the  constant,  en- 
ervating preoccupation  with  the  instinct  of  sex. 
Society,  politics,  education — all  bring  men  and 
women  into  contacts  which  are,  consciously  or  not, 
sexually  stimulating.  The  vast  industries  that 
serve  the  adornment  of  even  the  most  cultured  of 
modern  women  prove  these  very  women  to  be  pri- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       205 

marily  bent  upon  emphasising  the  sexual  appeal. 
To  this  menace  there  are  two  effective  retalia- 
tions :  one,  that  of  the  elder  Madras,  to  segregate 
women  as  in  the  Orient,  and  let  men  do  their  work 
in  the  world  in  virile  cleanness ;  the  other,  that  of 
the  younger  Madras,  to  force  our  civilisation  to  be 
less  of  a  "barnyard"  in  spirit,  to  wring  from  it 
a  culture  that  is  not  simply  a  veneer  over  sexual 
savagery. 

Scarcely  less  notable  a  play  is  Waste  (1907). 
It  has  the  same  natural,  unprogressive,  eddying 
rhythm  as  The  Madras  House.  The  associative 
connections,  the  articulations  of  speech,  are  often 
hidden,  just  as  in  life.  The  theme  of  the  play  is 
the  natural  prelude  to  that  of  The  Madras  House. 
A  statesman  of  the  finest  ideals  is  utterly  ruined 
by  a  woman's  false  use  of  the  freedom  that  men 
have  given  her.  The  scandal  of  her  death 
through  an  illegal  operation  kills  Trebell  politic- 
ally; the  fact  itself  wounds  a  far  nobler  side  of  his 
nature.  And  at  the  root  of  all  the  misery  is 
woman's  inability  to  rise  to  the  contemplation  of 
impersonal  ends.  Amy  O'Connell  basely  shirks 
the  glory  of  motherhood  because  Trebell  cannot 
and  will  not  profess  a  romantic  infatuation  for 
her.  And  even  Trebell's  admirable  sister,  at  the 
hour  of  his  deepest  need,  gently  reproaches  him 


206  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

for  never  having  thought  of  her  during  all  the 
years  of  their  common  life.  "No,  I  never  have," 
he  admits,  "but  I've  never  thought  selfishly 
either."  "That's  a  paradox,"  she  replies,  "I 
don't  quite  understand."  And  Trebell  sums  up 
the  whole  matter:  "Until  women  do  they'll  re- 
main where  they  are  ...  and  what  they  are." 
I  know  few  other  dialogues  or  situations  in  the 
whole  modern  drama  worth  closer  pondering  for 
the  light  thrown  on  one  of  the  most  vexatious  and 
wasteful  problems  of  contemporary  life. 

Mr.  Barker's  two  earlier  plays  are  less  personal 
and  hence  of  somewhat  smaller  significance. 
The  Marrying  of  Anne  Leete  (1899)  with  which 
he  began  is  an  attempt  to  carry  a  specifically 
modern  kind  of  psychology  into  the  eighteenth 
century.  One  has  an  uncomfortable  suspicion 
throughout  the  play  that  one  is  assisting  at  a 
masquerade,  and  that  the  real  Anne  Leete,  ances- 
tress of  the  girl  here  acting  a  shadowy  idealisation 
of  her  fate,  would  have  married  Lord  John  Carp 
and  been  vastly  pleased  with  her  coach  and  four. 
The  Voysey  Inheritance  (1905)  is  a  solid  and 
1  convincing  picture  of  a  well-defined  section  of 
English  society — an  exact  and  finished  piece  of 
naturalistic  dramaturgy.  But  it  is  Waste  and  The 
Madras  House  that  bear  witness  to  a  dramatist  of 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       207 

all  but  the  highest  promise  and  originality,  if 
time  and  circumstance  will  but  assist  Mr.  Barker 
to  an  intenser  productivity. 

In  a  volume  of  sketches  and  essays  beautifully 
named  The  Inn  of  Tranquillity  (1912)  Mr.  John 
Galsworthy  (b.  1867)  has  a  dozen  pages  called 
Some  Platitudes  Concerning  the  Drama.  I  take 
it  that  Mr.  Galsworthy  here  uses  the  word  plati- 
tude with  a  gentle  and  quiet  irony  not  unchar- 
acteristic of  him.  For  he  does  not,  I  am  sure, 
nurse  the  delusion,  pleasing  as  such  a  delusion 
would  be,  that  the  basic  principles  of  naturalistic 
dramaturgy  have  as  yet  any  general  acceptance 
among  the  English-speaking  peoples.  But  since 
it  is  the  partial  purpose  of  these  pages  to  contrib- 
ute to  such  an  acceptance,  I  cannot  do  better 
than  sum  up  these  principles  once  more  in  the 
faultless  dignity  and  wisdom  of  Mr.  Galsworthy's 
phrasing. 

"To  set  before  the  public  no  cut  and  dried  codes, 
but  the  phenomena  of  life  and  character  .  .  . 
requires  a  sympathy  with,  a  love  of,  and  a  curi- 
osity as  to  things  for  their  own  sake.  .  .  .  Mat- 
ters change  and  morals  change ;  men  remain — and 
to  set  men  and  the  facts  about  them,  down  faith- 
fully, so  that  they  draw  for  us  the  moral  of  their 


208  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

natural  actions,  may  also  possibly  be  of  benefit  to 
the  community.  It  is,  at  all  events,  harder  than 
to  set  men  and  facts  down,  as  they  ought  or  ought 
not  to  be.  .  .  .  The  true  lover  of  the  human  race 
is  surely  he  who  can  put  up  with  it  in  all  its  forms, 
in  vice  as  well  as  in  virtue,  in  defeat  as  well  as 
in  victory.  ...  A  good  plot  is  that  sure  edifice 
which  rises  out  of  the  interplay  of  circumstance  on 
temperament,  or  of  temperament  on  circumstance, 
within  the  enclosing  atmosphere  of  an  idea.  A 
human  being  is  the  best  plot  there  is.  .  .  .  He  is 
organic.  /The  art  of  writing  true  dramatic  dia- 
16gue~lsan  austere  art,  denying  itself  all  license, 
grudging  every  sentence  devoted  to  the  mere  ma- 
chinery of  the  play,  suppressing  all  jokes  and  epi- 
grams severed  from  character,  relying  for  fun  and 
pathos  on  the  fun  and  tears  of  life.  .  .  .  The 
question  of  naturalistic  technique  will  bear,  in- 
deed, much  more  study  than  has  yet  been  given  it. 
The  aim  of  the  dramatist  employing  it  is  evi- 
dently to  create  such  an  illusion  of  actual  life 
passing  on  the  stage  as  to  compel  the  spectator 
to  pass  through  an  experience  of  his  own,  to 
think  and  talk  and  move  with  the  people  he 
sees  thinking,  talking  and  moving  in  front  of 
him." 

Mr.  Galsworthy  is  the  author  of  eight  plays. 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       209 

Of  these  one,  Joy  (1907),  betrays  a  less  happy 
mood  and  art  than  the  others ;  another,  The  Little 
Dream  (1911),  represents  what  has  come  to  seem 
the  naturalist's  almost  obligatory  excursion  into 
neo-romanticism.  It  is  neither  poetry  nor  prose; 
the  author's  imagination  has  profoundly  possessed 
neither  his  substance  nor  his  form.  Here  nega- 
tive criticism  must  end.  Mr.  Galsworthy's  re- 
maining six  plays  are  all  masterpieces.  They  are : 
The  Silver  Box  (1906),  Strife  (1909),  The 
Eldest  Son  (1909),  Justice  (1910),  The  Pigeon 
(1912),  The  Fugitive  (1913). * 

The  special  note  of  Galsworthy's  art  is  its  re- 
straint. His  vision  is  wonderfully  keen  and 
clear  and  sober.  He  is  intensely  watchful  not 
to  overstep  the  modesty  of  emotions  and  events. 
He  is  never  showy,  never  violent,  never  a  special 
pleader.  In  his  plays  the  forces  of  life  them- 
selves come  into  conflict  and  grow  into  crises  with 
all  the  quiet  impressiveness  of  an  operation  of 
nature.  A  man  commits  a  crime;  he  is  tried  and 
punished.  Workingmen  strike  and  are  forced  to 
compromise.  The  inheritors  of  two  sharply  di- 
vided social  traditions  are  on  the  point  of  mar- 

iTo  these  must  now  be  added  the  severe  dramatic  apologue 
The  Mob  (1914).  Fine  as  that  piece  is,  it  makes  one  fearful 
lest  Mr.  Galsworthy  abandon  "men  and  the  facts  about  them" 
for  the  dramatic  exploitation  of  the  naked  idea. 


210  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

riage,  and  the  division  is  seen  to  be  too  deep.  A 
woman  flees  from  a  wretched  union  and  wears 
herself  out  against  the  hard  prison-walls  of  the 
social  order.  Each  of  these  sentences  sums  up 
one  of  Galsworthy's  fables.  It  also  sums  up  a  bit 
of  the  homespun  stuff  of  the  world's  daily  life. 
From  that  stuff  Galsworthy,  like  Hauptmann  and 
Hirschfeld,  wrings  beauty  and  terror,  laughter 
and  awe. 

In  choosing  the  angle  from  which,  at  a  given 
moment,  to  envisage  life,  Galsworthy  is  fond  of 
selecting  such  living  incidents  as  have  in  them- 
selves the  inevitable  structure  of  drama.  In 
Strife,  for  instance,  the  first  act  consists  of  a  di- 
rectors' meeting  of  the  Trenartha  Tin  Plate 
Works.  The  second  act  shows  the  men  in  their 
wretchedness,  their  division  and  their  need.  The 
third  act  represents  the  final  directors'  meeting  at 
which  the  compromise  between  capital  and  labour 
is  accomplished.  Justice  also  exhibits  a  succession 
of  events  which  is  quite  simply  that  of  life.  In 
the  first  act  poor  Falder's  crime  and  its  piteous 
motives  are  brought  to  light.  The  second  act 
shows  his  trial ;  the  third  his  punishment.  In  the 
last  act  we  see  him  a  ticket-of -leave  man,  crushed 
by  the  social  machine.  Galsworthy  has  not  al- 
ways, of  course,  been  able  to  attain  such  magnif- 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       211 

icent  severity  of  structure.  Life  itself  forbids  it. 
But  he  has  always  striven  to  approach  it,  econo- 
mising his  strength  for  the  creation  of  character. 

His  stage-directions  are  often  psychological  and 
often  contain  a  touch  of  generalisation.  But  such 
touches  are  never,  as  in  Shaw  or  Barker,  personal 
and  polemic.  They  never  violate  the  imperson- 
ality of  dramatic  art.  They  are  full  rather  than 
lengthy,  and  attain  such  fulness  by  a  frugal  ex- 
actness of  diction.  Not  infrequently  they  are  de- 
scriptive. But,  as  a  rule,  Galsworthy  creates  his 
atmosphere  by  subtler  and  less  obtrusive  means. 
The  raw  and  sordid  cruelty  of  civilisation  and  of 
nature  that  hovers  over  the  men's  meeting  in  the 
second  act  of  Strife  is  created  by  no  visible  arti- 
fice. It  inheres  in  the  situation,  the  hour  and  the 
mood. 

Galsworthy's  dialogue  is  the  best  dramatic  dia- 1 
logue  in  the  language.  Its  illusion  of  reality  is 
complete;  its  power  of  differentiating  character 
from  character  rivals  Hauptmann's.  ••  It  is,  fur- 
thermore, in  his  own  excellent  phrasing,  "hand- 
made, like  good  lace;  clear,  of  fine  texture,  fur- 
thering with  each  thread  the  harmony  and 
strength  of  a  design  to  which  all  must  be  subordi- 
nated." And  that  design  is  merely  the  rhythm  of 
the  "spiritual  action."  His  power  of  character- 


212  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

ising  through  the  tone  and  temper  and  form  of 
speech  rises  to  admirable  heights  in  the  self-ex- 
pression of  Mrs.  Jones  in  The  Silver  Box,  of  the 
several  working-men  who  address  their  fellows  in 
Strife,  of  Cokeson,  the  clerk,  in  Justice,  and  of  Sir 
William  Cheshire  in  The  Eldest  Son.  There  are 
few  happier  or  more  characteristic  touches  in  the 
dialogue  of  the  modern  drama  than  when  Sir  Wil- 
-^  liam,  profoundly  stirred  to  a  defence  of  his  ideals 
and  his  class,  turns  to  his  wife  with  these  words : 
fc±Jr\ "Nowadays  they  laugh  at  everything — they  even 
laugh  at  the  word  lady — I  married  you,  and  I 
I  don't."  But  examples  are  invidious  where  al- 
most every  phrase  has  the  inevitable  Tightness  of 
this  order  of  art  at  its  best.  I  borrow  a  sentence 
classical  in  the  traditions  of  our  literature  to  ex- 
press the  bare  justice  of  this  matter.  Whoever 
wishes  to  attain  a  style  in  dramatic  dialogue,  ex- 
act but  always  restrained,  natural  but  never  redun- 
dant, must  give  his  days  and  nights  to  the  vol- 
umes of  Galsworthy. 

This  temperate  and  reasonable  artist  who,  sur- 
veying man  and  his  world,  has  never  failed  to  put 

on 

"the  enquirer's  holy  robe 
And  purged,  considerate  mind," 

discovers  that  there  arise  from  this  survey,  more 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       213 

and  more  definitely  as  it  is  more  closely  pressed 
home,  a  series  of  moral  and  social  dilemmas  of 
literally  tremendous  force  and  import.  These 
dilemmas  form  the  intellectual  content  of  the 
drama  of  Galsworthy.  He  sees  them  and  is  able 
to  propound  them  by  reason  of  the  central  passion 
of  his  soul,  which  is  a  passion  for  justice.  Not 
the  ordinary  passion  for  justice  of  our  daily  papers 
and  our  daily  speech,  which  means  justice  for  some 
class,  some  individual  or  some  cause — but  justice 
for  all.  Galsworthy,  in  his  proper  person,  for 
instance,  is  on  the  side  of  labour.  Yet  he  has 
created  no  character  more  massive,  heroic  or  mem- 
orable than  old  Anthony,  the  ruthless  defender  of 
the  capitalistic  class  in  Strife. 

Characteristically,  then,  his  first  play  depicts 
the  gross  inequality  in  society's  treatment  of  men, 
and  ends  with  a  cry  for  justice.  The  miserable 
and  yet  tragic  Jones  writhes  in  the  hands  of  the 
constable  and  frees  his  soul : 

"Call  this  justice?  What  about  5im?  JE  got  drunk! 
JE  took  the  purse — 'e  took  the  purse  but  (in  a  muffled 
shout)  it's  5is  money  got  'im  off !  Justice/" 

And  the  whole  deliberate  callousness  of  the  so- 
cial order  is  summed  up  by  the  fact  that  no  de- 
fence answers  the  arraignment  of  Jones.  The 


214  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

magistrate  rises  and  remarks :  "We  will  now  ad- 
journ for  lunch."  In  this  play  only,  however,  is 
the  wrong  wholly  on  one  side.  We  meet  the  first 
of  the  great  dilemmas  of  Galsworthy  in  Strife. 

The  men  of  the  Trenartha  works  are  on  strike. 
Cold  and  hunger  are  upon  them.  They  are  aban- 
doned by  the  unions  to  whom  their  demands  seem 
untimely.  But  Roberts  sustains  them,  lashes 
them  on  to  desperate  resistance.  He  is  not  only 
a  reformer  and  a  born  leader  of  men,  but  a  man 
with  a  righteous  personal  grievance  against  cap- 
ital. He  will  not  compromise.  Neither  will  An- 
thony, chairman  of  the  board  of  directors.  Thus 
the  great  struggle  concentrates  itself  in  one  com- 
manding personality  on  each  side.  The  men  de- 
liberate, but  when  Roberts  is  called  away  by  his 
wife's  death,  they  abandon  him  and  accept  the 
lesser  demands  which  the  union  is  willing  to  make 
for  them.  Similarly  the  directors  outvote  An- 
thony and  accept  the  compromise.  Roberts  and 
Anthony,  the  strong  men  with  strong  convictions, 
are  broken.  The  second-rate  run  the  world 
through  half-measures  and  concessions.  Such  vic- 
tory as  there  is  remains  with  labour.  But  in  our 
ears  echoes  the  rumbling  eloquence  of  old  An- 
thony: "The  men  have  been  treated  justly,  they 
have  had  fair  wages,  we  have  always  been  ready 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       215 

to  listen  to  complaints.  ...  It  has  been  said  that 
masters  and  men  are  equal !  Cant !  There  can 
be  only  one  master  in  a  house !  Where  two  men 
meet  the  better  man  will  rule !" 

In  Justice  the  dilemma  is  sharper.  The  eco- 
nomic structure  of  society  on  any  basis,  requires 
the  keeping  of  certain  compacts.  It  cannot  en-  . 
dure  such  a  breaking  of  these  compacts  as  Falder 
is  guilty  of  when  he  changes  the  figures  on  the 
cheque.  Yet  by  the  simple  march  of  events  it  is 
overwhelmingly  proven  that  society  here  stamps 
out  a  human  life  not  without  its  fair  possibilities 
— for  eighty-one  pounds. 

The  Pigeon  is  like  an  exquisite  epilogue  to  these 
stern  dramas.  What  is  society  to  do  with  its 
failures — failures  from  its  own  point  of  view 
only?  For  are  not  Guinevere  Meegan  and  Tim- 
son  and,  above  all,  the  inimitable  Ferrand  quite 
infinitely  "jolly"  as  mere  human  creatures'? 
That  is  the  opinion  of  the  artist  Welwyn  who 
goes  for  wisdom  to  his  friends  the  professor,  the 
judge  and  the  priest: 

"According  to  Calway,  we're  to  give  the  State  all  we 
can  spare,  to  make  the  undeserving  deserving.  He's  a 
professor;  he  ought  to  know.  But  old  Hoxton's  always 
dinning  it  into  me  that  we  ought  to  support  private  or- 
ganisations for  helping  the  deserving,  and  damn  the  un- 


216  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

deserving.  And  the  vicar  seems  to  be  for  a  little  bit  of 
both.  .  .  .  And  there's  no  fun  in  any  of  them." 

It  is  from  the  lips  of  the  incorrigible  vagrant  Fer- 
rand  that  at  last  we  hear  wisdom.  "There  are 
some  souls,  Monsieur,  that  cannot  be  made  tame." 
It  is  he,  too,  who  propounds  the  final  dilemma  of 
society.  "If  you  do  not  wish  of  us,  you  have  but 
to  shut  your  pockets  and  your  doors — we  shall 
die  the  faster."  To  which  searching  remark 
Welwyn,  or  society — whichever  you  please — can 
but  answer  falteringly:  "But  that,  you  know — 
we  can't  do  it  now — can  we?" 

The  Eldest  Son  and  The  Fugitive  deal  with 
the  more  vivid  moral  dilemmas  of  the  personal 
life.  Sir  William  Cheshire  has  just  forced  one 
of  his  game-keepers  to  marry  a  village  girl  whom 
the  lad  has  wronged.  He  has  upheld  the  moral 
law.  Immediately  he  discovers  that  his  eldest 
son  has  been  guilty  of  the  same  conduct  with  Lady 
Cheshire's  maid.  And  Bill  insists  that  he  will 
play  fair  and  marry  the  girl.  Sir  William,  for- 
getful of  the  moral  law  which  he  has  enforced 
on  his  dependent,  protests  to  his  wife  : 

"I  say  it  would  be  a  tragedy ;  for  you,  and  me,  and  all 
of  us.  You  and  I  were  brought  up,  and  we've  brought 
the  children  up,  with  certain  beliefs,  and  wants,  and 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       217 

habits.  A  man's  past — his  traditions — he  can't  get  rid 
of  them.  They're — they're  himself!  (Suddenly')  It 
shan't  go  on !" 

Is  not  this  utterly  unanswerable?  Was  the  mar- 
riage of  the  village  lad  and  lass  at  all  compara- 
ble, in  the  grim  necessity  of  tragic  consequences, 
to  a  marriage  between  Bill  Cheshire  and  Freda? 
The  girl  and  her  father  have  the  good  sense  to 
see  this.  But  the  moral  law?  .  .  . 

In  his  most  recent  play,  The  Fugitive,  Gals- 
worthy has  for  the  first  time  treated  the  subject 
of  marriage.  With  his  usual  sobriety  and  quiet 
wisdom  he  has  not  chosen  a  union  disrupted  by 
violent  or  unwonted  causes.  "But  why  can't  we 
be  happy?"  George  Dedmond  asks.  And  Clare 
returns  the  overwhelmingly  sufficient  and  funda- 
mental answer:  "I  see  no  reason  except  that  you 
are  you  and  I  am  I."  But  this  best  of  all  pos- 
sible reasons  is  considered  no  reason  at  all  at  pres- 
ent. The  force  of  the  law  and  of  public  opinion 
are  wholly  on  the  husband's  side.  And  Clare  is 
neither  a  skilled  worker  nor  "a  saint  and  a  mar- 
tyr." With  complete  inevitableness  she  is  forced 
to  the  brink  of  prostitution — the  only  unskilled 
labour  for  a  woman  that  pays.  And  since  moral 
and  physical  inhibitions  prevent  her  from  taking 
the  leap,  there  is  left — just  death. 


218  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

Such  are  the  plays  of  John  Galsworthy.  But 
these  interpretative  outlines  scarcely  touch  the 
finest  triumph  of  his  art  which  lies  in  the  creation 
of  character.  No  modern  dramatist,  indeed,  save 
Hauptmann  and  Schnitzler,  can  show  within  the 
limits  of  six  plays  so  memorable  an  array  of  hu- 
man figures:  The  Barthwick  family  and  the 
Jones's  in  The  Silver  Box;  Anthony  and  Roberts, 
Thomas  and  Harness  and  Rouse  in  Strife;  the 
Hows,  father  and  son,  Cokeson,  Falder  and  Ruth 
in  Justice;  Sir  William  Cheshire  in  The  Eldest 
Son;  the  wonderful  Ferrand  in  The  Pigeon; 
George  and  Clare  Dedmond  and  Malise  in  The 
Fugitive. 

Galsworthy's  activity  as  a  dramatist  extends 
but  over  a  period  of  eight  years.  Yet  I  see  a  new 
novel  by  him  make  its  appearance  with  a  pang 
of  apprehension  and  disappointment.  For  he, 
above  all  other  men  now  in  view, -seems Called 
and  chosen  as  the  great  modern  dramatist  of  the 
English  tongue. 

VI 

«  • 

The  modern  drama  in  England,  represented  by 
Shaw  and  Barker  and  Galsworthy,  differs  from 
the  modem  drama  in  Germany  and  in  France  not 
so  vitally  by  its  extent,  as  by  the  underlying  cause 


THE  DRAMA  IN  ENGLAND       219 

of  that  narrow  extent — the  lack  of  an  adequate 
audience.  Inheritors  of  the  noblest  literature 
since  antiquity,  possessors  of  names  that  have 
turned  the  current  of  the  world's  thought — the 
great  mass  of  the  English-speaking  peoples  is 
still  imprisoned  in  the  iron  vise  of  moral  in- 
flexibility and  intellectual  prejudice.  On  the- 
ology, on  ethics,  on  art,  opinions  are  still  cur- 
rently held  in  England  and  America  by  people 
called  intelligent  which,  in  the  central  intellectual 
life  of  the  world,  have  long  passed  into  the  region 
of  history.  The  only  hope  for  the  art  of  the 
drama,  as  for  all  higher  forms  of  spiritual  activity 
among  us — and  this  applies  most  emphatically  to 
us  Americans — rests  in  the  possibility  that  our 
universities  may  gradually  assume,  in  the  class- 
room and  beyond  it,  their  highest  duty  to  the 
democracy:  the  creation  of  a  large  and  cultured 
class, ^flexible.in  intellect,  liberal  in  judgment,  not 
shocked  by  plain  speaking,  nor  insulted  by  art, 
nor  outraged  by  the  radiant  face  of  truth. 


CHAPTER  FIVE 

THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  THE 
EUROPEAN  DRAMA 


BEFORE  the  naturalistic  movement  had  conquered 
the  stage,  a  protest  was  raised  against  it  in  the 
land  of  its  origin.  The  protest  was  not  led  by 
reactionaries,  but  by  young  men  nursing  a  new 
vision.  Ostensibly  they  fought  a  literary  method, 
in  reality  a  philosophy  of  hard  despair.  To-day 
naturalism  means  probity  of  observation,  an  at- 
tempt to  interpret  life  through  itself.  There  is 
no  vision,  no  hope  for  the  soul  of  man  that  is  not 
reconcilable  with  the  naturalism  which  created 
Rose  Bernd  or  Strife.  In  1885  naturalism  meant 
the  positivistic  denial  of  the  existence  of  vision, 
of  the  reasonableness  of  hope.  It  was  the  literary 
embodiment  of  a  doctrinaire  science,  a  science 
which  rapid  and  wonderful  achievement  had  ren- 
dered arrogant.  The  echo  of  that  arrogance  is 
heard  in  the  critical  utterances  of  Zola.  "An 
identical  determinism  rules  the  stone  in  the  road 
and  the  brain  of  man;"  "our  works  have  the  ex- 

220 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA    221 

actness,  the  solidity  and  the  practical  applications 
of  works  of  science."  He  is  scornful  of  those 
who  object  to  the  experimental  novel  "through 
some  more  or  less  conscious  attachment  to  reli- 
gious or  philosophic  beliefs."  The  temper  of  that 
last  phrase  is  noteworthy.  Positivism  not  only 
fought  an  impossible  dogma;  it  denied  the  possi- 
bility of  any  philosophic  interpretation  of  the  sum 
of  things.  The  real  character  of  that  early  pro- 
test against  naturalism  was  not  long  unrecog- 
nised. It  was  made,  as  M.  Edouard  Rod  said 
in  1891,  "because  naturalism  was  the  literary  ex- 
pression of  an  entire  positivistic  and  materialistic 
movement  which  no  longer  answers  any  actual 
needs." 

Creatively  the  French  protest  against  natural- 
ism took  two  forms:  that  of  the  psychological 
novel  and  that  of  the  symbolist  movement  in 
poetry.  The  five  young  artists  who,  in  1887,  is- 
sued a  public  manifesto  against  the  "superficial 
observation  and  the  inordinate  stressing  of  the 
note  of  ordure"  in  Zola's  La  Terre^  were  all 
psychological  novelists.  The  group,  however,  did 
not  include  M.  Paul  Bourget  whose  excellent  mas- 
terpiece Le  Disciple  (1889)  sums  up  the  moral 
and  artistic  reaction  against  naturalism  of  the 
early  positivistic  type. 


222  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

This  development  in  the  art  of  fiction  did  not 
touch  the  drama  at  any  point.  It  is  otherwise 
with  the  symbolist  movement  in  poetry  from 
which  proceeds,  directly  or  indirectly,  the  neo-ro- 
mantic  drama  of  Maeterlinck,  of  Hugo  von  Hof- 
mannsthal  and  of  William  Butler  Yeats."  That 
movement  protested  against  the  marmoreal  out- 
line, the  steely  clang,  the  proud  impersonality  of 
the  Parnassian  school.  But  its  protest,  too,  was 
in  reality  a  deeper  one.  For  the  impersonal 
aloofness  of  Leconte  de  Lisle  is  but  a  gesture  by 
which  he  seeks  to  hide  his  grinding  despair.  His 
Dies  Irae  (Poemes  antiques,  1852)  and  his  L'll- 
lusion  supreme  (Poemes  tragiques,  1884)  are 
beautiful  and  terrible  at  once.  But  that  way 
madness  lies.  There  are  philosophies  which  are 
unendurable  not  because  men  are  cowards,  but 
because  they  are  men. 

The  official  founder  of  the  symbolist  school, 
Stephane  Mallarme  (1842-1898)  published  his 
collected  verses  in  1888.  But  the  real  master  of 
the  movement,  Paul  Verlaine  (1844-1896),  a 
lyrical  poet  of  the  first  order,  had  published  his 
mature  collections  Sagesse  and  Jadis  et  naguere 
in  1881  and  1885.  Beneath  a  good  deal  of 
merely  verbal  mysticism  and  obscurity  in  their 
theoretical  writings  the  aim  of  the  symbolists  ap- 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     223 

pears  clearly  and  intelligibly  enough:  to  depict 
the  frail,  the  exquisite  and  fugitive  movements 
of  the  soul  as  these  necessarily  blend  with  and 
identify  themselves  with  the  external  appear- 
ances which  our  sense  perceives.  In  this  aspect 
nature  is,  in  sober  truth,  an  array  of  symbols  of 
the  soul's  life.  These  symbols  and  their  subjec- 
tive content  the  new  school  sought  to  render  in 
fluid  and  trembling  forms,  in  the  haunting  music 
of  a  flexible  versification.  Both  their  theory  and 
their  method  have  been  explained  by  Hugo  von 
Hofmannsthal.  "A  certain  gesture  with  which 
you  leaped  from  a  tall  wagon;  a  sultry,  starless 
summer  night;  the  odour  of  moist  stones  in  a  hall- 
way; the  sensation  of  icy  water  which  a  fountain 
made  to  sparkle  over  your  hands — all  your  inner 
life  is  bound  to  a  few  thousands  of  such  earthly 
things,  all  your  exaltations,  all  your  yearning,  all 
your  ecstasies.  .  .  .  There  are  combinations  of 
words  from  which,  as  the  spark  from  the  beaten 
flint,  break  forth  the  landscapes  of  the  soul,  which 
are  immeasurable  as  the  starry  heaven  and  stretch 
out  into  space  and  time."  Mr.  Yeats  has  summed 
up  the  same  fundamental  idea.  "What  is  litera- 
ture but  the  expression  of  moods  by  the  vehicle 
of  symbol  and  incident?" 

From  the  symbolist's  escape  out  of  the  world 


224  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

of  hard  and  objective  forms  which  science  pre- 
sents, into  the  twilight  of  the  soul  where  the  seer 
and  his  vision  are  one,  it  was  but  a  step  toward 
an  open  scepticism  of  that  science  with  its  neces- 
sary assertion  of  the  complete  externality  to  the 
knower  of  the  thing  known.  The  whole  develop- 
ment of  thought  from  evasive  to  militant  neo-ro- 
manticism  is  expressed  with  unsurpassable  just- 
ness by  Anatole  France.  I  gather  these  highly 
significant  passages  from  the  four  volumes  of  his 
La  'Die  litteraire.  "It  is  most  clear  that  the  strong 
confidence  we  once  had  in  science  is  more  than 
half  lost.  .  .  .  What  are  these  things  you  call 
sciences,  if  you  please*?  Spectacles,  no  more,  no 
less.  ...  An  argument  pursued  on  any  complex 
subject  will  never  prove  anything  but  the  ability 
of  the  mind  that  conducts  it.  ...  There  is  no 
such  thing  as  objective  criticism,  any  more  than 
there  is  such  a  thing  as  objective  art,  and  people 
who  flatter  themselves  that  they  are  putting  any- 
thing but  their  own  selves  into  their  works  are 
dupes  of  the  most  fallacious  delusion.  .  .  .  We 
know  very  well  to-day  that  the  romance  of  the 
universe  is  as  deceptive  as  any  other,  but  at  that 
time  the  books  of  Darwin  were  our  Bible.  .  .  . 
The  things  which  touch  us  most  nearly,  which 
seem  to  us  loveliest  and  most  desirable  are  pre- 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA    225 

cisely  those  which  will  always  remain  vague  to 
us  and,  in  part,  mysterious.  Beauty,  virtue, 
genius — these  will  forever  guard  their  secret. 
Neither  the  charm  of  Cleopatra,  nor  the  sweet- 
ness of  Saint  Francis,  nor  the  poetry  of  Racine, 
will  ever  submit  to  formulation;  if  these  things 
sustain  a  relation  to  science,  it  is  to  a  science 
blended  with  art,  with  intuition,  a  restless  and 
ever  unfinished  one.  That  science  or  rather  that 
art  exists:  it  is  philosophy,  ethics,  history,  criti- 
cism, in  brief,  the  whole  beautiful  romance  of 
humanity."  The  protest  against  science  has  risen 
spontaneously  to  the  lips  of  every  neo-romanti- 
cist.  "The  scientific  movement  is  ebbing  a  little 
everywhere  .  .  ."  writes  Mr.  Yeats,  "and  I  am 
certain  that  everywhere  literature  will  return 
once  more  to  its  old  extravagant,  phantastical  ex- 
pression, for  in  literature,  unlike  science,  there  are 
no  discoveries,  and  it  is  always  the  old  that  re- 
turns." And,  in  another  place,  he  speaks  with  a 
brave  and  mystical  beauty:  "Let  us  go  forth, 
the  tellers  of  tales,  and  seize  whatever  prey  the 
heart  longs  for,  and  have  no  fear.  Everything 
exists,  everything  is  true,  and  the  earth  is  only  a 
little  dust  under  our  feet." 

These  quotations  are  somewhat  long.    But  they 
serve,  as  nothing  else  can,  to  mark  the  spiritual 


226  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

temper  of  the  neo-romantic  movement,  the 
grounds  of  the  protest  against  naturalism.  That 
protest,  so  eloquently  phrased  was,  after  all,  po- 
lemic and  hence  unjust.  Objective  truth,  cold, 
definite,  its  content  eternally  separate  from  the 
knowing  mind — that  is  beyond  our  reach.  In  so 
far  the  neo-romanticists  emphasised  a  fact  of  su- 
preme value.  But  there  are  orders  of  experience 
which,  granting  the  school  its  own  ground,  rise 
oftener,  more  definitely  and  more  concretely  into 
the  field  of  human  consciousness  than  others. 
The  kinds  of  experience  set  down  in  Michael 
Kramer,  in  Affiants,  in  The  Eldest  Son  belong  to 
this  type.  It  is  the  rarer  and  more  incommun- 
icable soul  in  which  arises  the  type  of  experience 
interpreted  in  Hofmannsthal's  Der  Tor  und  der 
Tod  or  in  Yeats'  The  King's  Threshold.  Hence 
whenever  naturalistic  art  ceases  to  base  itself  on 
a  shallow  positivism  and  thus  abandons  its  one 
mistake,  it  reassumes  at  once  the  high  human 
validity  that  belongs  to  it.  Nor,  finally,  were4 
the  neo-romanticists  willing  to  grant  naturalism 
its  disciplinary  and  formative  influence  upon  their 
own  work.  Yet  what  so  fundamentally  differen- 
tiates them  from  the  romantics  of  the  early  nine- 
teenth century  is  the  solidity  of  their  psychology. 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     227 

The  supreme  merit  of  Henry  of  Aue  and  of 
Chantecler  arises  from  the  fact  that  beauty  and 
vision  grow  here  from  nothing  extravagant  and 
phantastical  but  from  genuine  experiences  in  the 
soul  of  man.  And  that  genuineness  is  the  gift 
of  naturalism. 

The  liberation  of  speculative  thought  from  the 
cold  weight  of  positivism  went  hand  in  hand  with 
the  liberation  of  beauty.  From  1884  to  1892  ap- 
peared the  successive  parts  of  Nietzsche's  Also 
sprach  Zarathustra;  in  1895  Ferdinand  Brunet- 
iere's  highly  symptomatic  La  Science  et  la  Reli- 
gion; in  1897  William  James  announced  in  The 
Will  to  Believe  the  first  crystallisation  of  a  point 
of  view  which  we  shall  see  again  and  again  arising 
spontaneously  from  the  poetic  drama  of  the  age. 
The  naturalistic  drama,  meanwhile,  progressed  un- 
interruptedly. But  pure  form  and  pure  vision 
united  once  more  in  the  attempt  to  offer  a  syn- 
thetic interpretation  of  life.  And  there  I  have 
touched  upon  the  true  difference  between  these 
two  orders  of  art :  naturalism  sees  life  analyti- 
cally ;  neo-romanticism  sees  it  synthetically.  Nat- 
uralism sets  down  the  facts  of  experience;  neo-. 
romanticism  (or  classicism,  for  that  matter)  dis- 
tils what  seems  to  it  their  essence  into  significant 


228  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

forms.  Naturalism  ^describes  love  and  hate  and 
the  many  things  that  fill  the  world;  neo-romanti- 
cism  meets 

"under  the  boughs  of  love  and  hate, 
In  all  poor  foolish  things  that  live  a  day, 
Eternal  beauty  wandering  on  her  way." 

II 

As  early  as  1883  d16  symbolist  movement  in 
French  poetry  had  gained  a  number  of  young  ad- 
herents in  Belgium.  From  this  group,  which  ex- 
pressed itself  through  a  periodical.  La  jeune  Bel- 
gique,  arose  the  founder  of  the  symbolist  drama, 
Maurice  Maeterlinck  (b.  1862).  In  the  antholo- 
gies of  the  symbolist  lyric  his  name  stands  among 
the  names  of  Verhaeren,  Viele-Griffin,  Moreas 
and  Kahn,  signed  to  verses  of  a  strange  and  evan- 
escent beauty.  These  verses,  it  may  be  noted,  had 
a  profound  influence  upon  the  work  of  our  Amer- 
ican poet,  Richard  Hovey.  But  toward  the  end 
of  the  decade  Maeterlinck  turned  to  the  drama 
and  published  La  Princes se  Maleine  (1889). 

His  activity  as  a  dramatist  falls  into  two  very 
distinct  periods.  His  symbolist  plays  precede  the 
year  1901  and  end  with  Soeur  Beatrice.  The 
appearance  of  Monna  Vanna  in  1902  inaugurates 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA    229 

a  series  of  dramas  differing  markedly  both  in  char- 
acter and  value  from  his. earlier  work. 

In  the  plays  of  his  first  period  he  "has  disen- 
gaged art  from  the  details  of  actuality"  and 
achieved  a  "mystic  density"  of  texture.  But  a 
doom  more  dread  and  terrifying  thari  any  posi- 
tivistic  determinism,  a  blind  and  malevolent  fate, 
strikes  with  breathlessness  and  awe  these  kings 
and  princesses  and  lovers  by  the  green  shimmer 
of  their  inland  seas.  The  strange  iterations  of 
their  speech  with  its  monotony  as  of  dripping 
water  in  an  echoing  vault  deepens  the  impression 
of  flickering  helplessness.  And  man  here  has  built 
his  very  habitations  as  a  reflex  of  his  crushing, 
doom.  For  in  the  castles,  long  corridors  con- 
fuse the  feverish  souls  who  walk  in  them  and  lead 
their  steps  to  subterranean  caverns  where  a  dead 
and  creeping  sea  beats  at  the  crumbling  walls. 
There  is  neither  hope  nor  faith.  Only  the  mad- 
man crosses  himself.  There  is  not  even  spiritual 
action  in  this  drama,  for  there  is  no  escape,  how- 
ever fleeting  or  deceptive,  from  the  malignity  of 
fate.  "You  never  can  tell  if  you  have  made  a 
movement  for  yourself,  or  if  it  be  chance  that 
has  met  with  you,"  it  is  said  in  Alladine  et 
Palomides  (1894).  Ablamore,  in  the  same  play, 
says:  "You  did  what  was  ordained  and  so  did 


230  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

I."  The  same  thought  is  stressed  in  Pelleas  et 
Melisande  (1892).  "He  has  done  what  he 
probably  must  have  done."  Fate  is  ever  pres- 
ent, like  the  dread  queen  in  La  Mort  de  Tin- 
tagiles  (1894)  whom  men  must  "love  with  a 
great,  unpitying  weight  on  their  souls." 

These  early  plays  then,  in  so  far  as  they  have 
any  recognisable  relation  to  human  experience,  in- 
terpret it — by  a  shadowy  parallel  creation — in 
terms  of  the  strictest  fatalism.  By  a  parallel  cre- 
ation! For  human  life  is  in  no  wise,  however 
subtle,  imitated  here.  Men  may  be  fated,  but 
they  are  fated,  above  all,  to  a  conviction  of  free- 
dom at  every  moment  of  action. 

The  subjects  of  most  of  Maeterlinck's  sym- 
bolist plays  represent  merely  his  peculiar  atmos- 
phere investing  themes  that  have  long  been  the 
possession  of  literature  and  legend.*  La  Princesse 
Maleine  is  a  long  variation  upon  Shakespearean 
motifs :  the  terror  and  expectancy  at  the  opening 
of  Hamlet,  the  sense  of  doom  in  the  great  mur- 
der scene  in  Macbeth.  At  times  the  reminiscence 
becomes  almost  verbal,  as  in  the  saying  of  the 
old  king:  "It  would  take  all  the  waters  of  the 
flood  to  baptise  me  now."  Pelleas  et  Melisande 
is  clearly  a  variation  upon  the  story  of  Paolo  and 
Francesca;  Alladine  et  Palomides,  of  the  legend 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     231 

of  Tristran  and  Iseult.  Ariane  et  Barbe-bleu 
(1901)  is,  as  its  title  indicates,  a  symbolist  in- 
terpretation of  the  tale  of  Bluebeard;  Soeur  Beat- 
rice (1901)  deals  with  the  legend  so  powerfully 
told  by  John  Davidson  in  his  Ballad  of  a  Nun. 
Les  Sept  Princesses  (1891),  La  Mort  de  Tin- 
tagiles  (1894),  and  Aglavaine  et  Selysette 
(1896)  have  no  legendary  background.  They 
are  wholly  atmospheric — human  wraiths  sway  in 
the  bitter  winds  of  fate. 

These  plays  are  full  of  memorable  touches. 
Some  are  touches  of  pathos,  as  in  La  Princesse 
Maleine:  "If  you  had  at  least  put  her  to  death 
in  the  open  air!  But  here,  in  a  little  room!  In 
a  poor  little  room!"  Some  are  touches  of  a 
poignant  imaginative  charm,  as  that  description 
in  La  Mort  de  Tintagiles:  "There  reigned  such 
a  silence  that  the  falling  of  a  ripe  fruit  in  the 
park  called  faces  to  the  windows."  But  the  most 
sympathetic  and  patient  reader  will,  at  length, 
weary  of  the  monotony  of  the  point  of  view  and 
of  the  atmosphere  of  these  dramas.  I  must  not, 
upon  the  principles  of  early  symbolism,  ask  so 
crude  a  question  as:  What,  in  the  end,  is  it  all 
about?  I  content  myself  with  pointing  out  that 
the  poverty  of  intellectual  content — I  can  discern 
in  all  these  plays  but  the  one  idea  of  fatalism — 


232  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

needed,  to  make  it  supportable,  a  far  richer,  more 
varied  and  more  flexibly  imaginative  medium  than 
Maeterlinck  has  ever  been  able  to  command. 

I  have  purposely  left  three  plays  of  Maeter- 
linck's first  period  to  the  last.  For  in  these  three 
his  method  takes  on  a  higher  and  finer  meaning; 
they  deal  impressively  and  nobly,  through  such 
synthetic  symbolism  as  the  pure  theories  of  the 
school  demand,  with  universal  facts  of  human  ex- 
perience: the  suddenness  of  death's  imminence; 
the  dazed  searching  for  faith;  the  solitariness  of 
the  soul.  I  have  already  named  the  three  plays 
by  indicating  their  themes:  L'Intruse  (1890),  Les 
Aveugles  (1890),  Ulnterieur  (1894). 

Here  we  have  symbolism  at  its  purest  and  most 
exquisite.  Death  is  not  named  in  Llntruse,  nor 
faith  in  Les  Aveugles •,  nor  loneliness  and  division 
in  Llnterieur.  But  so  exquisite  is  the  adapta- 
tion of  the  symbolical  incidents  and  imagery  that 
the  universal  truth  is  in  each  instance  brought 
overwhelmingly  home.  The  forest  of  the  world, 
for  example,  in  Les  Aveugles  has  "an  eternal 
look"  despite  the  death  of  man's  immemorial 
faith.  The  blindness  of  men  cannot  discern  that 
look.  Yet  there  are  happy  souls  who  in  the  vis- 
ible presence  of  faith's  death  still  smell  "an  odour 
of  flowers  about  us."  Man,  the  reasoner  and  pos- 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA    233 

itivist,  answers  sadly:  "I  smell  only  the  smell 
of  the  earth."  Ulnterieur  is  mere  perfection  in  its 
kind.  A  thousand  human  sorrows  are  summed 
up  in  it,  a  thousand  grievous  estrangements.  The 
sayings  of  the  Old  Man  beside  that  haunting  win- 
dow have  a  touch  of  immortal  loveliness  and  of 
timeless  wisdom.  In  the  brief  compass  of  this 
little  play  the  symbolical  drama  in  prose  and  the 
art  of  Maeterlinck  both  reach  their  unmistakable 
culmination. 

With  Monna  Vanna  (1902)  he  conquered  the 
European  stage  and  became  a  conventional  play- 
wright. The  speeches  of  Guido's  father  and  of 
Giovanna  herself  still  keep  a  touch  of  the  old 
aloofness,  the  old  estrangedness  in  a  mortal  world. 
But  the  atmosphere  is  formed  of  the  traditional 
blood  and  lust  and  gold  of  the  early  Renaissance ; 
the  central  incident  is  of  an  Elizabethan  violence ; 
the  resolution  of  the  dramatic  conflict  commands 
the  assent  of  neither  the  imagination  nor  the  rea- 
son. Sudermann  might  well  have  arranged  these 
very  effective  struggles  that  compel  one's  momen- 
tary attention  but  leave  one's  deeper  sense  of  both 
poetry  and  reality  affronted  and  betrayed. 

The  art  of  Marie  Madeleine  (1910)  is  purer 
and  less  popular.  The  contrast  of  Longinus' 
cold  and  melancholy  wisdom  with  the  passionate 


234  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

and  more  human  hopefulness  of  the  new  faith 
rings  true  in  itself  and  is  dramatically  of  fine  tem- 
per. Nor  is  it  easy  to  urge  a  definite  objection 
against  the  result  of  that  conflict  by  which  Mary 
abandons  her  Master  to  save  her  Lord.  The  at- 
mosphere of  the  land  is  indicated  and  the  mood 
of  those  few  solemn  days.  But  throughout  the 
play  there  is  a  slight  sense  of  strain,  of  effort,  of 
an  essentially  fragile  and  unhuman  genius  deal- 
ing with  matters  too  large  for  its  delicate  grasp — 
a  weaver  of  wind-shaken  tapestry  striving  to  hew 
Titans  out  of  the  rocks  of  the  earth. 

Maeterlinck's  best-known  contribution  to  the 
modern  drama  is  UOiseau  bleu  ( 1909).  The  suc- 
cess of  the  play  has  been  epoch-making,  especially 
in  the  United  States  and  in  Russia.  It  has  carried 
his  name  where  he  was  hitherto  unknown  or  a 
shadow ;  it  has  earned  him  a  fortune  extraordinary 
even  in  these  days  of  dramatic  profits.  So  soon 
as  one  regards  the  play  quite  closely  the  apparent 
riddle  of  this  huge  success  is  solved.  The  form 
is  symbolical  to  be  sure,  but  not  with  the  close 
and  intimate  symbolism  of  Les  Aveugles  or  In- 
terieur.  The  play  consists  rather  of  a  series  of  lit- 
tle allegories  which  he  who  runs  may  read  and  he 
who  listens  with  but  half  an  ear  may  understand. 
And  what  is  the  content  of  these  allegories? 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     235 

That  the  dead  live  in  our  memories  of  them  (Act 
II,  Scene  I),  that  simple  pleasures  are  best  and 
most  harmless  (III,  II),  that  man  is  conquering 
disease  (III,  I),  and  that  he  will  more  and  more 
subdue  the  forces  of  nature  (V,  III),  and  finally, 
that  happiness  need  not  be  sought  afar  but  waits 
for  us  at  home.  Briefly,  the  play  expresses  a  cheap 
and  shallow  optimism.  No,  rather  a  pseudo-op- 
timism that  deceives  the  crowd.  For  if  the  dead 
live  only  in  our  memory  of  them,  the  hope  of  the 
world  is  indeed  a  self-deception.  And  if  that 
hope  be  a  deceptive  one  the  progress  of  both  medi- 
cine and  invention  is  but  a  drug  to  palliate  the 
agony  of  our  path  to  corruption.  It  little  mat- 
ters whether  a  train  run  fast  or  slow,  on  a  good 
roadbed  or  bad,  if  in  ten  minutes  it  is  doomed 
to  plunge  over  the  edge  of  a  cliff  into  eternal 
nothingness. 

Looked  at  in  detail  L'Oiseau  bleu  will  be  seen 
to  contain  not  a  few  charming  and  poetic  touches. 
It  is  the  work,  after  all,  of  a  man  of  genius,  but 
of  one  whose  genius  attained  but  a  few  moments 
of  perfect  expression  and  whose  really  masterly 
and  memorable  work  posterity  will  probably 
gather  between  the  covers  of  one  tiny  volume  hold- 
ing L'lntruse,  Les  Aveugles  and  Interieur, 


236  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

III 

In  the  land  of  its  origin  symbolism  never 
reached  the  stage.  The  symbolical  drama  is  a  cre- 
ation of  children  of  the  great  mystical  races — 
the  Germanic  Maeterlinck  and  Hauptmann,  the 
Jewish  Hofmannsthal,  the  Irish  Yeats.  The 
work  of  the  foremost  neo-romantic  dramatist  of 
France  is  symbolical  only  as  all  poetry  is  sym- 
bolical in  its  imaginative  texture  and  its  final 
meaning,  but  in  no  special  or  esoteric  sense. 

Edmond  Rostand  (b.  1868),  a  Frenchman  of 
the  South,  son  of  an  eminent  publicist  and  scholar 
of  Marseilles,  is  one  of  the  most  remarkable,  one 
of  the  most  widely  heralded  and,  in  English- 
speaking  countries,  one  of  the  least  known  writ- 
ers of  our  time.  For  Rostand's  virtue  lies  in  his 
form,  in  the  abundance  and  splendour  of  his  po- 
etic eloquence.  But  it  is  no  easy  matter  to  read 
him  with  the  French  of  Stratford-atte-Bowe, 
current  among  us  since  the  days  of  Chaucer's 
Prioress.  Nor,  on  the  other  hand,  is  it  possible 
to  gain  any  notion  of  his  power  from  the  cur- 
rent American  translations  of  his  two  best  plays. 
That  of  Cyrano  de  Bergerac  is  in  wooden  blank 
verse;  that  of  Chantecler  in  bald  prose.  Is  not 
that  an  instance  of  incompetence  glorying  in  its 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     237 

shame?  Hence  I  shall  illustrate  this  interpreta- 
tion of  his  work  by  translations  of  several  pas- 
sages in  which,  substituting  of  course  the  English 
heroic  verse  for  the  French  Alexandrine,  I  have 
attempted  to  present  a  shadow,  at  least,  of  his  real 
qualities. 

He  opened  his  career  as  a  dramatist  in  1894 
with  a  comedy  in  verse  called  Les  Romanesques. 
The  title  points  to  a  gentle  polemic  intention, 
anti-naturalistic  of  course,  which  is  deftly  but  dis- 
tinctly stressed  in  several  passages.  "The  scene 
is  laid  wherever  you  please,  if  only  the  costumes 
be  pretty."  The  hero  and  the  heroine  are  intro- 
duced in  the  act  of  reading  the  story  of  those 
"immortal  lovers,"  Romeo  and  Juliet.  A  hint  is 
borrowed  from  that  play,  another  from  Troilus 
and  Cressida.  Action  and  character  are  of  the 
slightest  and  are  intentionally  attuned  to  the  tra- 
ditional moods  of  romance.  But  the  whole  play 
sings  and  trills  like  a  garden  full  of  birds,  an 
early  presage  of  the  poetic  richness  and  fecundity 
of  Rostand's  genius.  At  the  play's  end  several 
of  the  characters  turn  to  the  audience,  even  as 
Rosalind  did  at  the  close  of  As  Tou  Like  It,  and 
offer  a  description  and  defence  of  it  in  the  alter- 
nate strains  of  a  rondel : 


238  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

"Love  at  his  flute  within  a  garden  close, 
Rest  for  our  nerves  from  all  these  bitter  plays ; 
O'er  scenes  by  Watteau  gentle  music  flows, 
A  brief  and  honest  tale  our  author  shows 
Of  parents,  lovers,  walled  and  flowery  ways 
And  costumes  clear  and  rimes  and  roundelays." 

A  touch  of  the  merely  trivial  and  pretty  appar- 
ent now  and  then  in  Les  Romanesques  was  strictly 
eliminated  by  Rostand  from  his  second  play  La 
Princesse  lointaine  (1895).  The  story  of  the 
play,  that  of  the  troubadour  Rudel  and  the  Lady 
of  Tripoli,  is  well-known  through  Browning's 
poem.  Rostand  has  given  the  episode,  so  ex- 
traordinarily poetic  in  itself,  a  somewhat  deeper 
meaning.  The  love  of  Rudel  for  the  far  away 
princess  becomes  in  the  play,  quite  naturally,  the 
type  of  all  disinterested  striving,  of  all  loyalty  to 
an  unseen  good.  This  inner  sense  of  the  story 
is  expressed  in  the  really  golden  lyric  of  Rudel 
which  echoes  and  re-echoes  throughout  the  play. 

"O  Love  supreme  that  burns 
Hopeless  of  love's  returns ; 
Tireless  by  night  it  yearns, 

And  day! 

With  such  vain  dreams  that  are 
Loftier  than  life  can  mar 
I  love  the  Princess  far 

Away." 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     239 

The  scenes  on  shipboard  and  at  the  lady's  court 
are  sharply  visualised.  But  the  chief  merit  of 
the  play  is  in  the  lilt  and  ripple,  the  brightness 
and  iridescence  of  the  beautiful  verses. 

But  neither  the  unwearied  and  unwearying 
magnificence  of  his  Alexandrines  nor  the  three 
marvellous  songs  of  the  woman  of  Samaria  could 
save  Rostand's  play  of  that  name  (La  Samari- 
taine,  1896)  from  artistic  failure.  His  gorgeous 
Latin  romanticism  is  glaringly  out  of  place  in  the 
stern  bareness  of  that  Hebraic  world.  When 
finally  Jesus  appears  as  an  acting  and  speaking 
character,  one  turns  away  from  M.  Rostand  as 
from  an  admirable  friend  suddenly  guilty  of  some 
gross  error  of  taste. 

That  error,  however,  was  easily  forgotten  in 
the  unparalleled  public  triumph  of  the  following 
year  (1897)  which  witnessed  the  appearance  of 
Cyrano  de  Bergerac.  Rostand's  verse  had,  per- 
haps, been  more  truly  poetical  and  of  a  more  en- 
gaging sweetness  in  his  earlier  plays.  But  never 
before  had  it  been  so  brave,  so  brilliant  or  so  copi- 
ous. And  the  splendour  of  execution  is  here  sup- 
ported by  a  solid  substructure  in  the  shape  of  a 
first-rate  poetic  study  of  character.  For  Cyrano 
is  superbly  alive.  There  is  no  question  as  to  the 
man's  earthborn  reality.  A  dreamer,  a  lover  and 


240  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

a  poet,  cursed  with  a  nose  to  make  children  scream 
and  women  laugh!  What  would  you  have  him 
be  but  truculent,  embittered,  wildly  independent? 
What  could  he  do  but  nurse  his  enforced  renun- 
ciations in  the  solitude  of  his  soul  and  clothe 
them  with  what  dreams  he  might?  His  fine  and 
final  triumph  may  not  be  wholly  credible.  But 
who  will  find  it  in  his  heart  to  quarrel  with  an 
invention  so  poetical,  so  exquisite  and  so  human? 
Roxane,  the  lady  of  Cyrano's  heart,  is  in  love 
with  a  fair-faced  fool.  Cyrano  writes  the  boy's 
letters  for  him,  speaks  his  adoring  words,  infuses 
his  whole  soul  into  the  empty  Gascon.  And  when 
the  years  have  gone  Roxane  discovers  whose  soul 
she  really  loved  and  whose  loss  she  really 
mourned.  Nor,  in  estimating  the  convincingness 
of  the  play's  incidents  must  it  be  forgotten  that 
Rostand  has  delineated  his  milieu — the  Paris  of 
Moliere — with  the  breadth  and  scrupulousness  of 
a  naturalist.  It  is  in  this  framework  that  the 
deeds  and  even  the  last  triumph  of  Cyrano  assume 
their  satisfying  verisimilitude.  That  triumph  is 
his  only  one.  He  is  not  even  happy  in  the  de- 
sired occasion  of  his  death. 

"Speaking  some  day,  beneath  a  sunset  sky, 
A  happy  word  for  some  fair  cause,  I'd  die !" 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA    241 

Such  had  been  his  wish  and  he  falls  victim  to  a 
vulgar  and  humiliating  accident.  But  the  man's 
indomitable  spirit  and  his  valorous  humour  rise 
above  the  wretchedness  of  his  end. 

"Mine  ancient  enemies  I  recognise: 

Lying  and  Cowardice  and  Compromise — 

The  hosts  of  Prejudice!     /  palter  now*? 

In  death  nor  life !     There,  Folly,  too  art  thou ! 

I  know  it  well,  thou'lt  hurl  me  into  night ! 

It  matters  not !     I  fight !     I  fight !     I  fight ! 

Thou  hast  robbed  me  of  the  laurel  and  the  rose ; 

Take  them !     Despite  thee  at  this  bitter  close 

I  carry  to  the  Heavenly  Courts  to-night, 

Where  my  salute  .shall  sweep  those  thresholds  bright, 

One  thing,  despite  thee,  stainless  of  my  doom, 

Erect,  unspotted,  f oldless ! — 'Tis  my  plume !" 

The  play  may  not  have  the  full  lyric  charm,  the 
singing  quality  of  La  Prmcesse  lointaine;  the  elo- 
quence may  have  hardened  a  little.  It  is  never- 
theless full  of  most  admirable  details:  Cyrano's 
tirade  on  noses,  on  poetic  independence,  on  the 
piper  of  his  native  land,  his  duelling  ballade  and 
his  ballade  on  the  cadets  of  Gascony.  Every- 
where the  medium  thrills  with  life  and  with  su- 
perb audacity.  The  art,  doubtless,  is  never  of  the 
highest.  Beside  the  sombre  spiritual  elevation 
of  Hauptmann's  Henry  of  Aue  a  shadow  as  of 


242  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

breathing  may  seem  to  fall  on  its  burnished  sur- 
face. But  of  its  kind  it  is  infinitely  beautiful  and 
engaging. 

I  must  omit  any  detailed  consideration  of  the 
powerful  and  pathetic  play  L'Aiglon  (1900).  It 
added  no  new  element  to  Rostand's  art.  For  ten 
years  the  poet  was  silent  and  then  produced  the 
widely  heralded  Chantecler.  It  is,  as  every  one 
knows,  an  apologue  in  which  Rostand  has  used 
the  very  ancient  device  of  a  world  of  speak- 
ing and  reasoning'  animals.  This  method  he 
has  carried  out  with  very  sharp  concreteness 
and  with  a  very  felicitous  blending,  in  the 
various  beasts,  of  the  human,  allegorical  and 
animal  notes.  The  golden  pheasant  does  not 
cease  to  be  a  pheasant  because  she  is  an  uncom- 
monly womanly  woman,  or  the  blackbird  to  be  a 
i  'ackbird  because  he  is  an  extreme  modern  and 
a  cynic;  Patou,  the  dog,  is  a  dog  and  an  old 
idealist  to  boot.  Chantecler,  above  all,  is  most 
excellently  cock-like,  although  he  is  a  poet,  a  phi- 
losopher and  a  lover.  The  two  scenes,  further- 
more, of  the  farmyard  and  the  forest — so  charm- 
ingly described  in  the  sonnets  that  serve  as  stage- 
directions — are  filled  with  a  multiform  and 
breathing  life  that  convinces  the  imagination  most 
happily.  The  central  incident  of  the  play  is  as 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     243 

well-known  as  its  general  plan.  Chantecler  be- 
lieves that  his  crowing  causes  the  sun  to  rise. 
The  golden  pheasant  lures  him  into  the  forest 
where  the  singing  of  the  nightingales  makes  him 
forget  to  crow.  The  sun  rises  and  his  tragic  dis- 
illusion overtakes  him.  But  the  cock  is  neither 
a  coward  nor  a  shirker. 

"Faith  that  so  deeply  in  the  soul  has  lain, 
Still  seeks  its  habitation,  even  slain." 

Nor  is  he  left  without  a  mission;  he  may  still 
cheer  his  fellows. 

"For  in  grey  mornings  when  poor  beasts  awake, 
Not  daring  to  believe  that  night  is  done, 
My  metal  clarion  will  replace  the  sun." 

The  pheasant  urges  him  to  forget  his  disillusion. 
His  answer  comes  without  hesitation:  lV 

"Nay,  I  ween 

I'll  never  forget  that  noble  forest  green, 
Wherein  I  learned  that  he  whose  dream  has  died 
Must  perish  or  arise  in  nobler  pride." 

It  is  not  necessary  to  press  the  meaning  of  the 
fable  too  closely.  Chantecler  is  a  poet  who  loses 
faith  in  his  ideal  activity  and  turns  to  practical 
helpfulness.  Or  else  man,  having  lost  faith  in 
himself  as  the  centre  of  the  universe  and  creating 


244  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

a  hardier  faith  by  which  to  live.  That  these,  as 
well  as  several  other  interpretations,  are  possible 
demonstrates  the  rich  and  valid  humanity  hidden 
in  this  play  of  beasts.  Its  liberal  and  fine  moral 
flavour  is  best  perceived  when  any  definite  inter- 
pretation is  avoided. 

The  poetic  and  imaginative  texture  of  Chante- 
cler  is  the  richest  if  not  the  sweetest  that  even 
Rostand  has  achieved.  The  medium  is  marvel- 
lously flexible  and  alive  in  every  fibre.  There  is 
no  otiose  syllable,  no  forced  rhyme,  no  awkward 
rhythm  in  all  this  shining  and  resounding  river  of 
verse.  Chantecler's  Ode  to  the  Sun,  the  villa- 
nelle  of  the  nightingales,  above  all,  the  lovely 
prayer  of  the  birds  in  the  fourth  act,  belong  to 
the  triumphs  of  French  poetry  and  French  versifi- 
cation. Perhaps  the  most  brilliant  piece  of  po- 
etic eloquence  in  the  play  is  Chantecler's  confes- 
sion of  his  faith  in  his  crowing: 

"The  cry  that  takes  from  earth  its  upward  flight 
It  is  a  cry  of  passion  for  the  light ; 
It  is  the  shivering  cry  of  love's  dismay 
For  that  most  golden  thing  we  call  the  day. 
This  all  would  see:  the  pine  upon  its  bark, 
The  paths  now  pathless  in  their  mosses  dark; 
The  grain  would  see  a  flash  on  delicate  blade, 
The  smallest  flint  its  facets  fiery  made. 
Oh,  'tis  the  eager  cry  of  all  that  yearn 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA    245 

To  have  their  colour,  brightness,  flame  return; 

It  is  the  suppliant  cry  the  meadow  cries 

For  rainbows  in  its  myriad  dewy  eyes ; 

Tis  the  sonorous  prayer  by  forests  made 

For  fires  of  dawn  in  their  obscurest  glade ; 

The  cry  which  to  the  azure  soars  through  me, 

'Tis  the  great  cry  of  all  things  that  would  be 

Saved  from  the  abyss  of  darkness  and  disgrace, 

Now  punished  by  the  sungod's  hidden  face; 

The  cry  of  sleepless  fear,  of  cold,  of  blight, 

Of  all  disarmed  and  driven  by  the  night — 

Of  the  rose  trembling  in  the  dark  alone, 

Of  the  grain  drying  for  the  miller's  stone, 

Of  ploughs  forgotten  by  the  reaper's  care 

Eager  to  cleave  the  sod ;  of  things  most  fair 

That  have  aweary  of  their  dullness  grown, 

The  cry  of  guileless  beasts  happy  to  own 

Their  innocent  deeds  in  the  broad  face  of  day, 

Of  streams  desiring  the  all-piercing  ray. 

Thy  works  disown  thee,  Night!     The  pools  desire 

To  glitter  gorgeously,  the  very  mire 

Dreams  of  the  earth  'twill  be  in  the  sun's  heat. 

It  is  the  field's  magnificent  cry  for  wheat 

To  pierce  its  bosom  through  the  glowing  hours, 

It  is  the  flowering  tree's  cry  for  new  flowers, 

It  is  the  grape's  cry  for  a  russet  cheek, 

The  bridge's  cry  for  some  brave  foot  to  seek 

Its  path  upon  whose  trembling  planks  are  stirred 

Shadows  of  trees,  hiding  the  shadowy  bird; 

The  cry  of  all  that  would  be  singing,  lose 

Its  grief  and  live  again  and  be  of  use ; 

Of  the  dumb  stone  glad  in  its  warmth  to  lie 


246  THE  MODERN  DRAiMA 

For  hands  to  seek,  or  ants  to  scurry  by ; 
It  is  the  cry  toward  light  of  all  the  wealth 
Of  all  earth's  Beauty  and  of  all  its  Health; 
Of  all  that  would,  in  sunshine  and  in  joy, 
Follow,  erect  and  clear-eyed,  their  employ; 
And  when  in  me  this  vast  appeal  to  day 
Rises,  my  soul  grows  larger  that  it  may, 
Being  more  spacious,  utter  that  great  cry 
Greatlier  still  and  more  sonorously. 
Yet,  ere  it  sounds,  one  moment  I  control 
Piously  that  vast  clarion  in  my  soul : 
But  when  at  last  it  soars  at  nature's  need 
I  am  convinced  of  a  supernal  deed : 
My  faith  proclaims — I  shatter  with  my  crow 
Night's  ramparts  like  the  walls  of  Jericho !" 

These  verses  do  not,  even  in  my  bald  transla- 
tion, quite  lose  their  admirable  and  stintless  elo- 
quence. It  is  not,  assuredly,  the  highest  poetry. 
A  line  of  Milton  or  of  Wordsworth  makes  the 
verse  of  Rostand  seem  somewhat  hard,  glaring  and 
earthly.  One  need  but  think  of 

"More  safe  I  sing  with  mortal  voice  unchanged 
To  hoarse  or  mute  .  .  ." 

or  of 

"Whose  dwelling  is  the  light  of  setting  suns  .  .  ." 

to  feel  that.     But  this  is  true  of  all  the  Titans, 
rather  than  the  gods  of  song — of  Dryden,  Cor- 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA    247 

neille,  Schiller.  But  of  these  masters  of  poetic 
eloquence,  an  eloquence  touched,  in  his  case,  by 
many  breathings  of  an  exquisite  modern  lyricism, 
M.  Rostand  is  the  legitimate  successor. 

IV 

Germany,  the  land  in  which  the  naturalistic 
drama  reached  its  highest  development,  also  bade 
the  most  eager  welcome  to  the  new  awakening  of 
romance.  Many  influences  and  streams  of  tend- 
ency helped  to  bring  this  about.  The  altruistic 
ethics  basic  to  naturalism  were  replaced  in  many 
minds  by  the  stern  qualitative  morality  of 
Nietzsche.  Readers  of  Also  sprack  Zarathustra 
felt,  in  addition,  the  impact  of  one  of  the  great 
masters  of  plastic  human  speech  whose  influence 
upon  the  style  of  modern  German  prose  and  verse 
cannot  be  overestimated.  There  was  besides,  in 
the  literature  of  the  mid-century,  a  tradition  of 
somewhat  coldly  finished  imaginative  work  rep- 
resented by  such  potent  names  as  Paul  Heyse  and 
Adolf  Wilbrandt.  And  this  tradition  gave  the 
decisive  impulse  to  at  least  one  neo-romanticist, 
Ludwig  Fulda  (b.  1862).  Most  powerful,  how- 
ever, was  the  example  of  foreign  masters.  In  the 
ideals  of  the  youngest  generation  Zola  and  Tol- 
stoi, Ibsen  and  Dostoieffsky,  yielded  to  Baudelaire 


248  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

and  Verlaine,  Maeterlinck  and  Swinburne,  D'An- 
nunzio  and  Oscar  Wilde.  And  thus  once  more 
periodicals  l  and  coteries  heralded  a  literary  revo- 
lution. 

Naturalism  has  outlasted  that  revolution. 
It  will  outlast  many  more.  For  a  time,  how- 
ever, neo-romantic  plays  commanded  not  only 
the  market  but  the  stage.  The  success  of  Fulda's 
Talisman  (1892)  was  so  resounding,  the  refresh- 
ment felt  in  the  presence  of  good  verse  and  grace- 
ful imagery  was  so  sincere,  that  the  German 
drama  became,  for  a  space,  a  gorgeous  and  glow- 
ing spectacle  in  which  faery  land  and  never-never 
land,  classic  and  oriental  antiquity  and,  above  all, 
the  Italian  Renaissance  blended  in  a  bewildering 
array  of  forms.  Yet  all  these  plays  owned  the 
inheritance  and  the  invaluable  discipline  of  nat- 
uralism in  the  logical  firmness  of  their  structure 
and  in  their  sound  and  subtle  psychology.  It  was 
naturalism  that  lent  them  all  the  qualities  by 

lich  they  differ,  upon  the  whole,  so  advanta- 
geously from  the  productions  of  an  earlier  genera- 
tion of  romantic  dramatists. 

Temporarily,  at  least,  the  neo-romantic  move- 
ment could  claim  almost  every  German  playwright 


1895-1899;    Die   Insel,    1899-1902;    Blatter   fur    die 
Kunst,  1892-1898. 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     249 

of  note.  Sudermann  wrote  his  Johannes  (1898) 
and  Die  drei  Reiherfedern  (1898)  ;  Schnitzler  his 
delightful  Paracelsus  (1892)  and  his  elaborate 
Der  Schleier  der  Beatrice  (1899);  even  the  con- 
sistent naturalists  Halbe  (Die  Ins  el  der  Seligen, 
1905)  and  Hirschfeld  (Der  Weg  zum  Licht, 
1902)  yielded  to  the  enchantment  of  the  imagina- 
tion. Nor  did  the  movement  fail  to  produce  iso- 
lated works  of  not  inconsiderable  power  and 
charm,  such  as  Frau  Bernstein's  Konigskinder 
(1895)  and  Otto  Julius  Bierbaum's  Gugeline 
(1899).  The  rank  and  file  of  the  neo-romantic 
drama,  however,  will  prove  ephemeral.  Its 
music  will  grow  thin  and  its  brightness  tarnish. 
I  am  sorry  to  be  forced  to  echo  the  consensus  of 
German  criticism  to  this  effect  even  upon  the 
work  of  that  tireless  and  earnest  spirit,  Ludwig 
Fulda.  He  has  been  able  to  identify  himself  im- 
aginatively neither  with  faery  land  nor  with  the 
East,  neither  with  antiquity  nor  the  Renaissance 
nor  the  realm  of  Arthurian  legend.  The  bright 
and  musical  verses  glide  past,  the  clever  ideas  hold 
the  mind  for  a  moment:  neither  the  imagination 
nor  the  soul  has  been  touched.  The  permanent 
German  contribution  to  the  neo-romantic  drama 
is  to  be  found  in  the  work  of  Hauptmann  and 
Hugo  von  Hofmannsthal. 


250  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

What  distinguishes  Hauptmann  from  all  other 
contemporary  playwrights  on  the  Continent  is  not 
only  his  austere  power  as  an  artist,  but  his  pro- 
foundly religious  nature.  He  is  not  committed 
to  any  dogma  nor  the  Pharisaism  of  any  moral 
convention.  But  he  lives  not  only  in  the  world; 
he  lives  in  the  universe.  Like  Goethe,  like  the 
great  poets  of  England,  he  is  aware,  above  all, 
of  the  three  or  four  eternal  problems  that  exercise 
the  spirit  of  man.  From  his  most  uncompromis- 
ingly naturalistic  plays — from  The  Weavers, 
Drayman  Henschel,  Michael  Kramer,  Rose 
Bernd — there  rises  that  heavenward  yearning  of 
which  he  has  spoken,  the  struggling  cry  of  men, 
even  though  broken  by  despair,  for  some  reconcil- 
iation with  the  universe  in  which  they  live.  To 
such  a  nature  the  impulse  necessarily  came  to 
grasp  a  number  of  human  problems  synthetically, 
and  to  express  his  innermost  self  with  that  direct- 
ness which  only  poetry  permits. 

His  first  departure  from  naturalism  was  partial 
and  tentative.  In  Hannele  (1893)  the  earthly 
environment  is  contemporary  and  crass  in  the  ex- 
treme. But  the  significance  of  the  fable  lies  in 
the  fact  that  even  from  such  an  environment  the 
heavenly  yearning  may  ascend.  Hannele  Mat- 
tern  is  the  child  of  outcasts;  she  dies  a  wretched 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA    251 

death  in  the  poorhouse.  But  the  neo-romantic 
passages  of  the  play  are  the  crystallisation  of  the 
visions,  the  dreams,  the  ecstasies  of  that  pure  and 
pious  imagination.  In  the  feverish  longings  of 
her  tormented  adolescence  she  loves  her  teacher; 
in  the  visions  of  her  faltering  mind  she  blends  his 
figure  with  the  Saviour's.  And  still  her  dreams 
are  shot  with  natural,  childish  longings  for  the 
visible  splendour  of  her  faery  princesses.  The 
psychology  is  as  exact  as  the  poetry  is  lovely — 
full  of  a  tremor  of  mystical  sweetness  that  vi- 
brates especially  in  the  closing  chorus  of  the  an- 
gelic messengers: 

"A  solemn  greeting  we  bring  thee 

Borne  far  through  the  darkness  of  space; 

Upon  the  edge  of  our  pinions 
A  breath  of  the  heavenly  grace. 

A  wafture  prophetic  of  Springtime 

From  the  hem  of  our  garments  is  shed, 

On  our  lips  that  salute  thee  with  singing, 
The  blossom  of  dawn  is  red. 

O  mystical  green  of  our  homeland! 

Our  feet  with  its  radiance  are  shod ; 
In  the  deeps  of  our  eyes  there  shimmer 

The  spires  of  the  City  of  God." 

The  Sunken  Bell  (1906),  though  raised  by  its 


252  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

form  and  method  into  the  realm  of  the  timeless,  is 
the  drama  of  the  creative  thinker  of  our  age. 
The  problem  of  the  modern  artist  is — as  Haupt- 
mann  has  shown  in  Lonely  Lives  and  again,  quite 
recently,  in  Gabriel  Schilling's  Flight — the  con- 
flict between  personal  and  ideal  ends.  However 
blended  with  other  motifs,  the  kernel  of  the  play 
is  there.  The  faith  by  which  Heinrich,  the  bell- 
founder,  lives  is  a  faith  in  the  presence  of  the 
creative  power  in  his  soul. 

"What's  germed  within  me's  worthy  of  the  blessing — 
Worthy  the  ripening." 

His  one  aim  is  to  see  that  germ  ripen  regardless 
of  the  world  and  its  rewards,  regardless  of  his 
personal  happiness.  To  understand  the  play,  it 
is  necessary  to  lay  hold  upon  the  deep  reality  and 
sincerity  of  that  thought.  Into  the  soul  of  the 
true  artist  all  forms  and  features  of  life  bring 
only  an  added  pang  if  its  central  purpose  is  unreal- 
ised. And  it  is  this  truth  which  the  homely  en- 
vironment of  Heinrich's  personal  life  does  not 
know.  His  bell  falls  into  the  mere.  And 
Magda,  his  wife,  exclaims: 

"Pray  Heaven  that  be  the  worst ! 
What  matter  one  bell  more  or  less,  if  he 
The  master  be  but  safe." 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     253 

The  master  is  indeed  alive  though  full  of  despair 
because  the  bell,  as  he  alone  knows,  was  lost  by 
no  mere  chance. 

"  'Twas   for   the   valley,   not  the   mountain-top !" 

And  to  this  cry  of  the  artist's  despair  his  wife 
replies : 

"That  is  not  true!     Hadst  thou  but  heard  as  I 
The  Vicar  tell  the  Clerk  in  tones  that  shook, 
How  gloriously  'twill  sound  upon  the  heights." 

The  opinion  of  the  vicar  and  the  clerk  are  her 
norm.  Of  the  unapproached  ideal  she  knows 
nothing.  Thus  Heinrich,  driven  by  what  is 
deepest  in  him,  goes  up  into  the  hills  and  finds 
a  spirit  of  beauty  and  refreshment,  Rautendelein ; 
he  finds  the  pagan,  pre-Christian  world  of  nature. 
Here  he  will  bring  his  treasures  to  light.  There 
is  no  hardness  of  heart  in  his  abandonment  of  his 
home.  He  cannot  help  Magda,  for  to  her  his 
wine  would  be  "but  bitter  gall  and  venom."  He 
stays  upon  the  heights  with  Rautendelein;  all 
nature  aids  him  to  build  the  temple  of  his  dreams. 
The  ignorant  cries  of  hide-bound  men  only  con- 
vince him  more 

"Of  the  great  weight  and  purpose  of  his  mission." 
And  yet  he  fails.     It  is  the  tragedy  of  the  creative 


254  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

soul.  Too  great  a  part  of  himself  is  merely  hu- 
man and  clings  to  the  homely  realities  and  affec- 
tions of  his  merely  human  life. 

"Yonder  I  am  at  home  .  .  .  and  yet  a  stranger — 
Here  am  I  strange  .  .  .  and  yet  I  am  at  home." 

His  children  bring  their  mother's  tears  up  the 
moutitainside  and  the  sunken  bell,  stirred  by  her 
dead  hands,  tolls  the  destruction  of  his  hopes. 
Yet  he  dies  clasping  his  creative  vision  to  his 
heart.  For  it  is  better  to  die  so  than  to  return  to 
the  "service  of  the  valleys"  where  the  ideal  is  an 
outcast  and  a  stranger. 

In  Henry  of  Aue  (1903),  the  second  culminat- 
ing point  of  Hauptmann's  neo-romantic  drama, 
he  has  dealt,  through  the  medium  of  a  legend 
known  in  German  literature  for  nearly  a  thousand 
years,  with  the  problem  of  natural  evil.  The 
legend  tells  of  a  great  knight  and  lord  who  was 
smitten  with  leprosy  and  whom,  according  to  the 
mediaeval  belief,  a  pure  maiden  desired  to  heal 
through  the  shedding  of  her  blood.  But  God, 
before  the  sacrifice  could  be  consummated, 
cleansed  the  knight's  body  and  permitted  to  him 
and  the  maiden  a  united  temporal  happiness. 
The  framework  of  this  story  Hauptmann  takes 
as  he  finds  it.  But  the  characters  are  made  to 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     255 

live  with  a  new  life.  The  stark  mediseval  con- 
ventions are  broken  and  the  old  legend  becomes 
living  truth.  The  maiden  is  changed  from  an 
infant  saint  fleeing  a  vale  of  tears  into  a  girl  in 
whom  the  first,  sweet  passions  of  life  blend  into 
an  exaltation  half  sexual  and  half  religious,  but 
pure  with  the  purity  of  a  great  flame.  The  mira- 
cle, too,  remains,  but  it  is  the  miracle  of  love  that 
subdues  the  despairing  heart,  that  reconciles  man 
to  his  universe  and  that  slays  the  imperiousness  of 
self.  For  it  is  when  Henry's  mad  defiance  is 
broken,  when  he  has  ceased  to  blaspheme  a  uni- 
verse where  such  things  can  be;  it  is  when  he  be- 
lieves in  a  divine  mercy  which  his  faith  can  help 
to  create — it  is  then  that  the  symbolical  miracle 
takes  place.  Like  Job  he  cries  out  upon  God  for 
the  evil  that  has  come  upon  him;  unlike  Job  he 
does  not  bow  at  last  to  a  resistless  power,  but  to 
a  loving  kindness  at  the  core  of  things. 

"O  Hartmann,  like  a  soulless  husk  of  flesh, 

An  evil  wizard's  creature  of  dead  clay, 

And  not  God's  child — fashioned  of  stone  or  brass — 

This  art  thou  till  the  pure  ethereal  stream 

Of  divine  love  has  poured  its  living  fire 

Into  the  hull  mysterious  that  hides 

The  miracle  of  being  from  our  ken. 

Then  art  thou  thrilled  with  life !     Unfettered,  free, 

The  immortal  light  fulfills  the  mortal  heart, 


256  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

Radiantly  breaking  through  thy  prison's  walls, 
Redeeming,  melting  thee  and  all  thy  world 
In  the  eternal  universe  of  love." 

The  workmanship  of  Henry  of  Aue  is  probably 
the  noblest  in  the  neo-romantic  drama.  Haupt- 
mann  has  not,  in  his  verse,  the  brilliant  eloquence 
of  Rostand,  nor  the  eerie  sweetness  of  Yeats,  nor 
the  brocaded  pomp  of  Hofmannsthal.  His  are 
a  sombre  glow,  an  austere  spiritual  passion,  ca- 
dences that  satisfy  an  ear  accustomed  to  the  blank- 
verse  of  the  English  masters.  To  such  qualities 
no  translation  can  do  full  justice.  Yet  the  con- 
trast will  gain  somewhat  in  clearness  by  compar- 
ing my  tentative  version  of  the  confession  of 
Chantecler  with  this  rendering  of  the  final  lines  in 
the  vision  of  Ottegebe. 

"Then,  silent,  in  that  dim  mysterious  hour, 

Rising  from  Southward  and  from  Northward,  poured 

As  from  a  fountain,  a  radiant  light  and  clear, 

And  from  that  light  in  one  strange  minute  rose 

Slowly  two  silent,  alien  suns  that  moved 

Gradually  higher,  farther,  and  higher  still, 

Till  in  the  zenith  they  became  as  one. 

Now  a  great  purity  fell  over  all — 

In  me,  about  me,  upon  heaven  and  earth ; 

And  from  those  constellations  o'er  my  head 

The  sweet,  immortal  Saviour  issued  forth. 

And  a  vast  music  sounded  as  of  Choirs 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     257 

Numberless,  and  the  song  came:     Sursum  cor  da! 
Gloria  in  excelsis  Deo!  and  last 
A  great  and  goodly  voice  sounded  and  sang : 
Amen !     For  thy  beseeching  hath  been  heard, 
And  broken  is  the  burden  of  his  doom!" 

It  is  not  necessary  to  consider  in  detail  the  other 
neo-romantic  plays  of  Hauptmann.  Continuous 
perfection  of  workmanship,  unfailing  steadiness 
of  inspiration  are  not  notes  of  the  Germanic  gen- 
ius. Neither  And  Pippa  Dances  (1906)  nor 
Charlemagne's  Hostage  (1909),  neither  Griselda 
(1910)  nor  The  Bow  of  Odysseus  (1914),  rises 
to  the  level  of  The  Sunken  Bell  or  Henry  of  Aue. 
Yet  German  criticism  has  been  singularly  ungrate- 
ful for  these  later  pieces.  To  compare  them  to 
the  works  of  lesser  men  is  to  recognise  at  once 
their  elements  of  high  and  permanent  beauty. 
Nor,  in  such  a  world  as  this,  do  we  despise  Cym- 
beline  because  it  is  not  Lear,  nor  Georges  Dandin 
because  it  is  not  Le  Misanthrope.  Gerhart 
Hauptmann  is  stricken  by  the  shattering  doubts, 
the  searching  perplexities,  the  vast  driftings  of 
modern  life.  But,  such  as  he  is,  we  must  acknowl- 
edge him  as  surely  the  representative  dramatist 
of  our  time  as  Shakespeare  and  Moliere  were  of 
theirs. 

Hugo  von  Hofmannsthal  was  born  late  enough 


258  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

(1874)  to  escape  that  ardent  revolution  which 
made  naturalism  supreme  in  German  letters. 
Keats,  D'Annunzio  and  Swinburne  were  his  mas- 
ters, no  less  than  the  French  symbolists  and  his 
Austrian  fellow  countryman,  the  eminent  lyrist, 
Stephan  George.  He  has  himself  set  forth  his 
method  and  his  ideal  in  a  prose  as  chiselled  and  as 
perfectly  wrought  as  his  verse.  His  criticism  of 
naturalism  is  reasoned  out  very  clearly.  "These 
poets  submerge  themselves  constantly  in  the  ele- 
ments of  their  age  and  seem  never  to  rise  above 
those  elements.  Their  eternal  surrender  to  their 
substance  (and  it  matters  so  little  whether  that 
substance  be  of  the  outer  world  or  the  world  of 
the  soul)  expresses  something  like  a  renunciation 
of  all  synthesis,  a  withdrawal  of  themselves,  an 
unworthy  and  incomprehensible  resignation." 
And  the  special  power  of  creative  artists  seems 
to  Hofmannsthal  to  rest  in  this,  that  "by  virtue 
of  the  deep  passion  which  impels  them  they  can 
assign  to  each  new  thing  its  place  in  that  orderly 
vision  of  the  whole  which  they  bear  within;  by 
virtue  of  that  untamable  passion  they  can  bring 
all  things  into  relation  with  each  other."  Hence 
he  calls  "a  synthesis  of  the  contents  of  his  age" 
the  indispensable  achievement  of  the  poet.  And 
men  seem  to  him  to  be  athirst  for  such  a  synthesis. 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     259 

"They  seek  in  books  what  once  they  sought  before 
fragrant  altars,  in  the  twilight  of  cathedrals  which 
their  yearning  had  taught  to  soar.  They  seek 
what  is  to  unite  them  more  powerfully  than  aught 
else  with  the  world  and  at  the  same  time  take 
from  them  the  world's  heaviness.  They  seek  a 
self,  leaning  upon  which,  their  own  selves  may 
grow  less  disquieted.  In  a  word,  they  seek  all  the 
enchantment  of  poetry.  .  .  .  For  they  would  not 
stand  shivering  in  their  nakedness  under  the  stars." 
I  quote  these  sayings  at  some  length  because 
they  present  the  whole  real  case  against  the  pre- 
dominance of  naturalistic  art.  The  tragic  reply 
to  Hofmannsthal's  arraignment  is  this :  The  poet 
cannot  give  a  synthesis  of  any  portion  of  the  gen- 
eral life  of  man  except  under  the  sway  of  some  con- 
trolling vision  of  the  totality  of  things — a  vision 
that  is  either  clearly  seen  by  the  eye  of  reason  or 
unfalteringly  beheld  by  the  eye  of  faith.  Thus 
only  can  he  "synthesise  the  contents  of  his  age." 
But  how  is  the  modern  poet  to  attain  to  such  a  vi- 
sion for  which  we  ask  the  priest,  the  scientist,  the 
philosopher  in  vain?  For  the  universe  has  grown 
vast  and  wild  and  untamable  and  we  cannot  snare 
it  with  the  old  merciful  dreams !  Thus  the  fate 
of  the  dramatic  poet  who  divorces  himself  from 
concrete  reality  and  aims  at  a  synthetic  dealing 


260  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

with  life  will,  usually,  be  either  one  of  two  things : 
He  will  either  be  subjective  and  unconsciously 
lyrical  in  the  drama,  or  he  will  take  refuge  in  an 
archaic  vision  of  the  world.  And  such  has  been 
the  twofold  fate  of  Hofmannsthal  himself.  In 
his  symbolistic  plays  there  is  but  one  protagonist 
—himself,  surrounded  by  the  shadows  of  his  pro- 
jected moods.  In  the  more  sombre  masterpieces 
of  his  maturity,  in  Elektra  (1903)  and  Odipus 
und  die  Sphinx  ( 1906),  he  has  taken  refuge  in  an 
Hellenic  vision  of  life  which  has  its  grandeur  and 
its  imperishable  artistic  and  cultural  validity,  but 
which  will  never  again  help  any  soul  to  "hide  its 
nakedness  under  the  stars." 

Hofmannsthal's  fame  was  securely  established 
by  a  series  of  symbolical  dramas  in  one  act  and 
in  verse  written  between  1891  and  1899.  Struc- 
turally these  plays  can  hardly  be  said  to  be  dra- 
matic at  all.  There  is  no  interplay  of  forces;  the 
crises  are  purely  subjective.  The  characters 
speak  past  each  other  into  the  void.  Nor  need 
one,  I  think,  be  ashamed  to  confess  that  the  mean- 
ing of  several  of  these  plays — Der  Kaiser  und  die 
Hexe  (1897)  or  Das  Bergwerk  zu  Falun  (1899) 
— quite  escapes  the  closest  attention  and  the  com- 
pletest  passivity  to  the  poet's  method.  But  what 
distinguishes  all  these  plays  is  their  form.  }The 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     261 

verses  are  like  magnificent  robes  sweeping  through 
corridors  of  porphyry  and  alabaster;  in  every  fold 
are  arduous  fulness  of  dignity  and  grace.  There 
is  very  little  passion  and  no  violence  at  all ;  there 
is  the  perfection  of  studied  and  learned  beauty. 
But,  indeed,  all  figures  halt.  For  Hofmanns- 
thal's  contribution  to  literature  is,  closely  con- 
sidered, unique.  We  find  in  him  a  classical  ful- 
ness of  self-contained  formal  perfection  embody- 
ing the  dreams  and  marvels  of  the  symbolist. 
The  chiselled  cup  is  not  filled  with  a  Falernian  or 
a  Massic  vintage,  but  with  the  magic  potions  of 
romance.  To  that  form,  in  itself,  Hofmannsthal 
attributes  the  highest  significance.  "The  artif- 
icer's form,"  to  use  his  own  words — although  I 
translate  this  scrupulous  and  difficult  poet  with 
reluctance — 

"The  artificer's  form 

Of  words  that  are  drenched  in  water  and  in  light, 
Wherein  I  subtly  weave  reflected  glow 
Of  these  adventures  in  such  ways  that  far 
Blond  boys  dwelling  in  cities  dark  and  hearing 
Thereof,  exchange  in  silence  heavy  glances, 
And  under  burden  of  an  undreamed-of  fate 
Waver  like  over-laden  vines  and  whisper: 
'Oh  that  I  knew  more  of  these  deeds  and  dreams, 
For  in  some  wise  I  am  woven  into  them, 
And  cannot  tell  where  dream  and  life  divide  ?'  " 


262  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

The  boy  Hofmannsthal  (for  since  he  wrote 
Gestern  in  1891,  he  sets  a  new  standard  of  pre- 
cocity in  the  annals  of  literature)  had  quite  evi- 
dently fallen  under  the  influence  of  the  English 
aesthetic  movement.  The  ideal  of  Andrea,  the 
protagonist  of  Gestern,  could  be  perfectly  ex- 
pressed by  the  familiar  lines  of  Wilde: 

"To  drift  with  every  passion  till  my  soul 

Is  a  stringed  lute  on  which  all  winds  may  play." 

But  already  the  young  poet  has  premonitions  of 
a  maturer  wisdom.  For  Andrea  finds  that  the 
snare  of  yesterday  is  upon  him  and  that  man  can- 
not live  in  the  isolated  moods  of  his  moments  with 
however  "hard  and  gemlike  a  flame"  they  may 
burn. 

Hofmannsthal  breaks  definitely  with  sestheti- 
cism  in  his  most  famous  one  act  play  Der  Tor  und 
der  Tod  ( 1893).  This  play  has  been  truly  called 
a  modern  Faust  in  miniature.  Claudio  is  the 
modern  slave  of  sesthetic  culture;  he  has  lived 
entirely  through  the  visions  of  art  and  has  re- 
jected reality.  Love  and  friendship  have  been 
to  him  but  as  pictures.  He  has  grasped  what 
seemed  most  precious  and  finds  his  hands  and  his 
soul  empty  at  the  last.  Death  reveals  to  him  the 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA    263 

sacred  experiences  that  he  has  missed,  the  fulness 
of  life  that  has  passed  him  by. 

Never  have  Hofmannsthal's  verses  been  more 
faultless  or  his  music  more  enchanting  than  in 
these  very  early  plays.  He  indulges  himself  here 
in  the  luxury  of  rhyme  denied  to  some  of  his  later 
plays  which  seek  the  form  and  meaning  of  beauty 
in  the  Orient  (Die  Hochzeit  der  Sobeide,  1899), 
in  islands  of  the  tropic  sea  (Der  weisse  Packer, 
1897),  or  by  the  shores  of  the  Northern  ocean 
(Das  Bergwerk  zu  Falun,  1899). 

Did  the  poet  feel  that  his  symbolism,  toward 
1900,  was  approaching  an  extreme  tenuousness? 
At  that  period,  at  all  events,  a  profound  change 
came  over  the  spirit  of  his  work.  He  now  set 
himself  the  task  of  re-creating — not  of  translating, 
despite  his  large  use  of  existing  form  and  sub- 
stance— the  older  masterpieces  of  literature.  His 
reinterpretation  of  Otway's  Venice  Preserved 
(Das  gerettete  Venedig,  1905)  can  scarcely  be 
said  to  surpass  the  definite  but  moderate  merit  of 
the  original.  In  his  two  masterpieces  Elektra  and 
Odipus  und  die  Sphinx  he  has  employed  a  far 
higher  order  of  imaginative  power. 

Hofmannsthal  invites  no  comparison  with  the 
great  Attic  dramatists.  His  aim  is  different.  It 


264  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

is  to  get  behind  those  dramatists  to  the  wild  hu- 
man origins  of  the  myths  with  which  they  deal, 
to  the  fierce  and  primitive  and  noble  folk  that 
must  have  antedated  the  Greece  of  immortal  mar- 
bles and  Sophoclean  choruses.  And  that  imagi- 
native vision  he  has  reconstructively  grasped  with 
an  energy  and  tenacity  that  no  one  would  have 
suspected  from  the  heavy  fragrance  of  his  earlier 
work.  The  verse  in  these  Greek  plays  is  sinewy, 
bare,  expressive,  the  mood  stern  yet  impassioned, 
the  dramatic  rhythm  sweeps  along  like  the  storms 
that  hover  over  the  dark  forests  and  mysterious 
shrines  of  that  pre-classical  Hellenic  world. 
What  Hofmannsthal  has  most  powerfully  laid 
hold  upon  is  the  idea  of  fate,  not  as  a  literary  con- 
vention, but  as  the  immediate  spiritual  experience 
of  an  entire  world.  We  shake  with  Clytemnestra 
under  the  shadow  of  her  ineluctable  doom;  we 
flee  with  Odipus  from  the  oracle's  certain  predic- 
tion; we  cower  in  the  courtyard  with  Elektra 
under  the  terror  of  that  fated  revenge.  The 
modern  poetic  drama  has  little  to  show  that  sur- 
passes these  figures  and  these  situations  in  a 
strange  gloom  and  massiveness  of  imaginative 
power.  I  venture,  with  a  sense  of  its  extreme  in- 
adequacy, to  quote  my  rendering  of  a  portion  of 
the  farewell  of  Odipus  to  his  father  and  mother. 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     265 

The  cadences  are  quite  new  in  any  language;  in 
the  original  they  have  a  repressed,  grief-stricken 
hardness  of  music. 

"Tell  my  father  and  tell  my  mother  that  once  on  each 

day 
At  this  hour  when  the  earth  shakes  with  fear  through 

all  her  ways, 

Because  night  the  heavy  darkness  on  her  lays, 
They  shall  recall  to  their  heart  that  their  son  still  breathes 

the  air, 

Then  will  I  kneel  me  adown  somewhere, 
And,  when  the  hands  of  the  nightwind  in  forests  stir, 
Like  human  breathing,  heavy,  oppressed, 
Come  visions  of  them  to  my  breast. 
And  sometimes,  though  it  be  not  each  day, 
A  presage  will  come  to  them  straight  from  the  nightwind 

wild, 
Which   will    be    stirring    and    gently   whirring   by   the 

window  where  they  sleep ; 
Then  are  they  to  know  that  it  is  their  child." 

It  is  quite  impossible,  of  course,  to  sum  up  the 
genius  or  the  achievement  of  Hofmannsthal. 
The  poet  is  in  his  fortieth  year  and  the  recent  de- 
velopment in  his  work  justifies  almost  any  hope 
for  his  future. 


To  England  the  naturalistic  movement  came 
last  of  all.     Even  now,  despite  the  great  work  of 


266  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

John  Galsworthy,  it  has  but  a  precarious  foothold 
there.  Thus  the  time  for  an  English  neo-roman- 
ticism  has  hardly  come.  Plays  in  verse  are  writ- 
ten, for  the  old  closet-drama  still  sustains  a  fitful 
and  sequestered  life.  And,  fifteen  years  ago,  even 
good  critics  like  Sir  Sidney  Colvin  hailed  in 
Stephen  Phillips  (b.  1868)  the  inaugurator  of  a 
new  age  of  dramatic  poetry.  Doubtless  there 
were  very  beautiful  passages  in  the  early  plays  of 
Mr.  Phillips,  in  Paolo  and  Francesca  (1899),  in 
Herod  (1900),  even  in  Ulysses  (1902).  But  the 
manner  and  tone  of  even  these  was  derivative. 
The  plays  themselves  were  sustained  by  no  native 
and  vital  energy.  They  were  conventional,  built 
for*  scenic  display,  empty  of  ideas,  without  depth 
or  hardihood  of  character.  They  were  the  works 
of  a  poet,  indeed,  but  of  a  poet  whose  method 
and  style  were  old  enough  to  be  old-fashioned,  not 
old  enough  to  be  ancient,  and  therefore  strangely 
new  and  splendid.  They  look  withered  enough 
now  just  as,  in  another  fifteen  years,  will  look 
the  Tennysonian  exercitations  of  Mr.  Alfred 
Noyes. 

In  those  days  there  will  come  into  his  kingdom, 
late  and  world-worn,  the  most  gifted  and  original 
English  poet  of  his  generation,  the  creator  of  a 
new  blank  verse  and  of  a  new  lyrical  music.  At 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     267 

the  time  of  his  tragic  failure  in  health  Arthur 
Symons  (b.  1865)  was  working  at  two  plays  in 
verse,  a  Tristran  and  Iseult  and  a  tragedy  of 
Cornish  peasant  life,  The  Harvesters.  But  these 
masterpieces  of  the  English  neo-romantic  drama 
are  lost.  Two  dramatic  fragments  Faustus  and 
Helen  and  Otho  and  Popp<za  alone  are  left  us, 
and  those  priceless  moralities  The  Dance  of  the 
Seven  Sins,  The  Lover  of  the  Queen  of  Sheba  and 
The  Fool  of  the  World.  These  have  the  tensely 
quiet,  the  timeless  music  of  rhythm  and  thought 
and  passion  that  all  of  Symons'  work  has.  They 
do  not  belong,  strictly  speaking,  to  the  history 
of  the  drama  at  all. 

No,  the  English  neo-romantic  drama  has  not 
come  from  England;  it  has  come  from  Ireland  and 
its  chief  representatives  are,  I  take  it,  Mr.  Yeats, 
(b.  1865),  Lady  Gregory  and  the  late  John  Mil- 
lington  Synge. 

So  much  has  recently  been  written  of  the  Irish 
movement  by  people  who  understand  it  well,  that 
I  shall  let  my  own  account  of  it  be  quite  brief. 
And  I  am  the  more  impelled  to  such  brevity  by  the 
suspicion  that  I  look  upon  these  Irish  plays  with 
the  eyes  of  a  stranger  who,  though  most  eager  to 
understand  and  to  sympathise  with  the  latest  pro- 
ductions of  a  brave  and  charming  race,  feels  his 


268  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

eyes  dimmed  by  these  infinite  patterns  in  faintest 
green  and  grey  and  silver,  and  his  ears  dulled  by 
the  endless  and  endlessly  subdued  murmur  of 
these 

"Old,  unhappy,  far-off  things 
And  battles  long  ago." 

My  vision  is  at  the  breaking  point  for  a  note  of 
colour,  my  hearing  for  a  tone  of  passion.  In 
vain.  When  her  beloved  dies  without  a  glance 
for  her  and  Grania  turns  to  Finn  in  the  wild  bit- 
terness of  her  grief,  her  speech  remains  like  an 
exquisite  decorative  pattern  in  style.  And  in- 
deed I  think  it  is  meant  to  be  so  from  two  passages 
I  find  in  Mr.  Yeats'  Ideas  of  Good  and  Evil.  "I 
would  like  to  see  a  poetical  drama  which  tries  to 
keep  at  a  distance  from  daily  life  that  it  may  keep 
its  emotion  untroubled,  staged  with  but  two  or 
three  colours."  And  further  on  in  the  same  re- 
markable book  he  confesses  his  conviction  that 
"the  hour  of  convention  and  decoration  and  cere- 
mony is  coming  again."  Reading  these  sentences 
and  thinking  of  Mr.  Yeats'  The  Shadowy  Waters 
(1900)  or  Lady  Gregory's  Dervorgilla  (1907), 
I  see  that  this  art  intentionally  approaches  a  dec- 
oration and  a  ceremony,  in  the  mystical  and  relig- 
ious sense,  and  thus  deliberately,  from  my  point 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA    269 

of  view,  renounces  the  vitality  and  meaningful- 
ness  reserved  for  art  that  grows  from  the  imme- 
diate experience  of  the  impassioned  soul.  I  can 
understand  a  drama  that  would  "keep  at  a  dis- 
tance from  daily  life;"  but  a  drama  that  would 
thereby  "keep  its  emotion  untroubled,"  that  is  to 
say  the  emotion  (if  I  understand  rightly)  it  is 
trying  to  express,  is  frankly  lyrical  or  decorative 
and  not  dramatic  at  all. 

Behind  these  theories  of  art  there  hovers,  of 
course,  a  vision  of  the  world.  When  Mr.  Yeats 
writes, 

"How  shall  I  name  you,  immortal,  mild,  proud  shadows  ? 
I  only  know  that  all  we  know  comes  from  you, 
And  that  you  come  from  Eden  on  flying  feet," 

I  am  aware  of  that  joy  which  is  the  perception  of 
beauty.  For  this  verse  is  like  the  swaying  of  road- 
side grasses  and  there  is  a  faint,  wild,  inimitable 
pathos  in  its  uncertain  cadencesj  But,  unless  I 
stupidly  misunderstand,  Mr.  Yeats  expresses  here 
what  is  to  him  not  a  sentiment  but  a  conviction. 
He  really  believes  that  the  legends  of  Celtic  an- 
tiquity contain  a  mystic  truth  which  is  the  key  to 
the  door  of  the  world's  secrets.  In  other  words 
his  art  is  based  upon  a  vision  of  things  which  is 
not  only  unreal  but,  if  one  must  be  frank,  puerile. 
In  addition,  there  is  in  Mr.  Yeats'  work  a  kind 


270  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

of  wild  logic,  like  the  logic  of  mad  people.  That 
quality  may  be  illustrated  by  the  play  in  prose 
Where  There  Is  Nothing  ( 1903).  At  the  opening 
of  the  play  Paul  Ruttledge  is  overtaken,  like  most 
of  us  in  our  more  illuminated  moments,  by  a  sense 
of  the  utter  triviality  of  practical  things,  of  pos- 
sessions and  conventions  and  laws.  So  he  joins 
the  tinkers  and  there  is  some  very  excellent  de- 
scription of  the  roadside  life.  Interesting,  too, 
and  humorous  is  the  trial  of  the  Christians  in  the 
fourth  act,  though  it  is  based  upon  an  obviously 
unfair  assumption.  But  Paul  is  unaccustomed  to 
exposure  and  must  leave  the  road  to  take  refuge 
in  a  monastery.  Here  he  develops  his  early  re- 
bellion against  a  worldly  and  materialistic  life 
into  a  heresy  for  which  he  and  his  adherents  are 
driven  out.  And  the  apparently  logical  but  quite 
mad  conclusions  to  which  he  has  come,  are 
summed  up  thus :  "We  must  destroy  all  that  has 
law  and  number!"  "Where  there  is  nothing, 
there  is  God!"  Now  it  is  obvious  that  law,  in 
the  sense  of  natural  law,  and  number,  do  not  in- 
here in  things  at  all,  but  are  the  human  mind's 
really  very  mysterious  way  of  dealing  with  things 
and  subduing  them  into  order  and  helpfulness. 
You  cannot  destroy  law  by  destroying  things,  but 
only  by  destroying  physicists;  you  cannot  destroy 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     271 

number  except  by  destroying  mathematicians.  In 
brief,  Mr.  Yeats  not  only  believes  like  a  child,  he 
also  reasons  like  a  child.  And  that  is  bound  to 
vitiate  a  work  of  art  the  main  business  of  which 
is  to  reason  about  life  and  things. 

Mr.  Yeats'  plays  in  verse  are  always  sustained 
as  literature,  if  not  as  drama,  by  the  enchanting 
beauty  of  their  medium,  by  that  "speech,  de- 
lighted with  its  own  music,"  though  even  here  one 
often  yearns  for  emphasis,  concentration,  density. 
Some  of  these  plays,  moreover,  are  no  less  exqui- 
site for  their  meaning  than  for  their  form.  I  am 
not  thinking  of  The  Countess  Cathleen  (1899) 
which  carries  but  a  commonplace  moral  in  the  end, 
but  of  The  Land  of  Heart's  Desire  (1894)  in 
which  the  old  Pagan  world  of  visible  charm  and 
brightness  and  beauty  captures  the  Irish  lass,  and 
pre-eminently  of  that  pregnant  poem  The  King's 
Threshold  (1903)  with  its  fine  protest  against 
the  least  compromise  on  the  supreme  and  eternal 
issues;  with  its  great  reply  of  the  poet  Seanchan 
to  his  beloved: 

"If  I  had  eaten  when  you  bid  me,  sweetheart, 
The  kiss  of  multitudes  in  time  to  come 
Had  been  the  poorer ;" 

and  with  its  brave  emphasis  upon  the  arts  which 
are  the  light  of  the  world: 


272  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

"Comparing  them  to  venerable  things 

God  gave  to  men  before  he  gave  them  wheat." 

In  these  plays  Mr.  Yeats  has  seen  "the  world  as 
imagination  sees  it"  and  that,  indeed,  as  he  says, 
is  "the  durable  world."  But  very  often  he  and 
his  fellow  workers  in  the  Irish  movement  have  de- 
scribed a  world  which  only  their  very  special  kind 
of  imagination  has  seen  at  all,  and  it  is  then  that 
their  art  seems  fragile  and  evanescent  and  a  little 
empty. 

In  the  plays  of  Lady  Gregory  the  impression  of 
merely  decorative  art  is  most  marked.  And  the 
reason  I  take  to  be  this :  These  plays  are  not 
symbolical.  They  are  "folk  and  history"  plays, 
and  are  supposed  to  move  us  by  their  humanity, 
by  creatures  of  flesh  and  blood  acting  or  suffering 
in  some  way.  But  they  are  removed  into  utter 
remoteness  by  an  indescribable  detachment  of  ac- 
tion and  gesture  and  by  the  unvaried  modulations 
in  the  prose  of  the  dialogue.  That  monotony  is 
not  base  or  careless;  it  is  carefully  studied.  But 
the  effects  of  hundreds  of  pages  of  it  on  one  mind 
at  least  are  terrible.  It  hurts  the  eyes  of  the  mind 
as  unendurably  as  the  eyes,  of  the  body  would 
be  hurt  if  you  passed  in  front  of  them  thousands 
of  yards  of  Irish  lace  of  the  same  pattern.  The 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA     273 

rawest  melodrama  is  like  balm  after  this  exqui- 
sitely conscientious  art. 

But  has  not  the  Irish  movement,  indeed,  lost  all 
vision  of  reality?  The  late  J.  M.  Synge  (1871- 
1909)  for  instance,  in  his  preface  to  The  Tinker's 
Wedding  (1907)  sharply  condemns  the  modern 
"analysts  and  their  problems,"  and  contrasts  with 
their  work  "the  best  plays  of  Ben  Jonson  and 
Moliere  which  can  no  more  go  out  of  fashion  than 
the  blackberries  on  the  hedges."  Now  Moliere 
analysed  all  the  problems  of  his  time — pedantry 
and  snobbishness  and  quackery  and  hypocrisy  in 
religion  and  in  manners  and  in  intellectual  things, 
just  as  the  moderns  analyse  marriage  and  poverty 
and  justice.  And  though  the  scholar  can  recon- 
struct an  adumbration  of  the  kind  of  pleasure  that 
Ben  Jonson's  plays  must  once  have  given,  they 
are,  in  the  deep  and  emphatic  sense  of  Synge, 
thoroughly  out  of  fashion,  and  far  more  resemble 
half-obliterated  paintings  than  blackberries. 

Thus  it  would  be  curious  to  inquire  of  unso- 
phisticated and  sensible  Irish  people  whether  they 
accept  The  Tinker's  Wedding  and  especially  The 
Playboy  of  the  Western  World  (1907)  with  its 
perfectly  amazing  central  incident  (all  the  more 
amazing  and  unnatural  if  it  is  meant  to  be  funny) 


274  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

as  representative  of  the  Irish  life  they  know.  It  is 
not  necessary  to  ask  any  such  question  concerning 
Riders  to  the  Sea  (1904).  The  play  is  a  one- 
act  tragedy,  thoroughly  naturalistic  in  structure 
'and  method,  human  in  every  fibre,  ending  upon  a 
note  of  almost  intolerable  pathos  in  Maurya's  re- 
lief that  the  sea,  having  taken  the  last  of  her  sons, 
^  can  do  her  no  more  hurt. 

If  this  account  of  the  Irish  movement  seems  not 
only  unduly  brief,  but  hopelessly  inadequate,  I 
can  only  plead  that  its  world  is  one  to  which — 
with  such  obvious  and  splendid  exceptions  as  The 
King's  Threshold  and  Riders  to  the  Sea — no  pre- 
vious experience  of  literature  or  life  seems  to  give 
me  an  entrance  or  the  power  of  being  intellec- 
tually at  home.  In  those  rarefied  regions  of  a  sere 
and  fluttering  beauty  I  seem  to  hear  the  echo  of 
that  pathetic  sentence  quoted  by  Matthew  Arnold 
in  his  lectures  on  The  Study  of  Celtic  Literature: 

'They  went  forth  to  battle,  but  they  always 
fell.  .  .  ." 

VI 

The  success  of  the  neo-romantic  movement  in 
modern  literature  has  been,  in  its  revival  of  the 
poetic  spirit  and  in  its  liberation  of  art  from  the 
dull  fetters  of  positivistic  conceptions.  It  differs 


THE  NEO-ROMANTIC  DRAMA    275 

from  the  romantic  movement  of  the  early  nine- 
teenth century  by  the  soundness  of  its  psychology 
and  the  firmness  of  its  structural  forms.  And 
these  two  qualities  it  owes  to  the  great  presence 
and  discipline  of  naturalistic  art.  But  it  is  these 
very  qualities  that  helped  it  to  overcome  the  mere 
lyricism  of  romance  and  lay  hold  upon  the  art  of 
the  theatre.  No  earlier  romanticism  ever  suc- 
ceeded in  doing  that.  For  the  drama,  however 
poetical  in  form,  is  nothing  without  a  solid  and 
fundamental  correspondence  to  the  stuff  of  which 
human  life  is  made.  Such  a  correspondence,  as 
well  as  poetry  of  notable  greatness,  is  to  be  found 
in  Henry  of  Aue,  in  Chant ecler,  in  Elektra,  in 
The  King's  Threshold.  The  romantic  revolt  of 
an  earlier  period  has  no  drama  that  can  be  placed 
beside  these  works. 

The  failure  of  the  neo-romantic  movement  is 
due  to  the  greatness  of  its  ambitions.  It  has  tried, 
in  many  instances,  to  give  a  synthetic  interpreta- 
tion of  its  age,  and  it  has  not  had — as  I  attempted 
to  point  out — any  vision  of  the  sum  of  things  in 
the  light  of  which  to  give  that  interpretation.  Is 
that  failure  necessarily  permanent?  I  think  not. 
We  will  never  again,  perhaps,  in  Western  civilisa- 
tion, attain  the  spiritual  assurance  of  the  past. 
We  cannot  divest  ourselves  of  that  knowledge 


276  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

which  makes  the  ultimate  problems  of  such  heart- 
breaking difficulty  and  complexity.  But  sooner 
or  later — not  I  am  sure,  in  the  direction  of  Prag- 
matism— but  in  the  direction  of  such  a  reinterpre- 
tation  of  man's  historic  life  and  the  real  values  of 
that  life,  as  E^ucken  has  offered,  we  may  attain 
the  goal  of  a  calmer  heart,  a  less  distracted  mind. 
It  is  then  that  the  neo-romantic  poet,  assured  of 
the  permanence  of  a  few  values,  will  be  able  to 
synthesise  the  life  of  free  personalities  in  a  free 
world,  and  surpass  our  immediate  contemporaries 
whose  poetic  activity  has  had  to  be,  so  largely,  a 
reaction  against  false  gods  rather  than  the  unfet- 
tered creation  of  new  and  fairer  ones. 


STUDY  LISTS 


STUDY  LISTS 


THE  REPRESENTATIVE  WORKS  OF  THE 
MODERN  DRAMA 

GROUP   I 

(Illustrating  the  Foundations  of  the  Modern  Drama.) 

Ibsen :     Ghosts — 1881. 
Ibsen:     The  Lady  from  the  Sea — 1888. 
Strindberg:     Comrades — 1888. 
Zola:     Therese  Raquin — 1873. 
Becque:    Les  Corbeaux — 1882. 

GROUP   II 

(Illustrating  the  Realistic  Drama  in  France.) 
Curel:    Les  Fossiles — 1892. 
Porto-Riche :    A  moureuse —  1 89 1 . 
Lavedan:     Viveurs — 1895. 
Brieux:    Le  Berceau — 1898. 
Brieux:     Les  Hannetons — 1906. 
Hervieu:    La  Course  du  Flambeau — 1901. 
Hervieu :     Connais-toi —  1 909. 
Lemaitre:     Le  Pardon — 1895. 
Donnay :    Amants — 1895. 

GROUP   III 

(Illustrating  the  Naturalistic  Drama  in  Germany.) 
Hauptmann:     The  Weavers — 1892. 

279 


280  STUDY  LISTS 

Hauptmann:     Michael  Kramer — 1900. 
Hauptmann:     Rose  Bernd — 1903. 
Sudermann:     Die  Schmetterlingsschlacht — 1895. 
Halbe :    Jug  end — 1893. 
Hirschfeld:     Agnes  Jordan — 1898. 
Hartleben:     HannaJagert — 1893. 
Wedekind :     Fruhlings  Erwachen — 1894. 
Schnitzler:     Liebelei — 1894. 
Schnitzler:     Der  einsame  Weg — 1903, 

GROUP    IV 

(Illustrating  the  Renaissance  of  the  English  Drama.) 

Wilde:     An  Ideal  Husband— 1895. 
Pinero:     The   Thunderbolt — 1910. 
Shaw:     Candida — 1894. 
Shaw:     Man  and  Superman — 1903. 
Galsworthy :     Strife —  1 909. 
Galsworthy:     The  Eldest  Son — 1909. 
Barker:     The  Madras  House — 1909. 

GROUP  v 

(Illustrating  the  Neo-Romantic  Movement  in  the  Modern 
Drama.) 

Maeterlinck:     Les  Aveugles — 1890. 
Maeterlinck:     Interieur — 1890. 
Rostand:     Cyrano  de  Bergerac — 1897. 
Piostand:     Chantecler — 1910. 
Hauptmann:     The  Sunken  Bell — 1896. 
Hauptmann:     Henry  of  Aue — 1903. 
Hofmannsthal :     Der  Tor  und  der  Tod — 1893. 
Hofmannsthal :     Odipus  und  die  Sphinx — 1906. 
Yeats:     The  Land  of  Heart's  Desire — 1894. 
Yeats:     The  King's  Threshold — 1903. 


STUDY  LISTS  281 

B 

THE  SUBJECT  MATTER  OF  THE  MODERN 
DRAMA 

GROUP    I 

Plays  dealing  with  Poverty  and  Social  Justice. 

Becque:     Les  Corbeaux 
Brieux :    B  lanchette 
Brieux:     La  Robe  rouge 
Hauptmann:     The  Weavers 
Hauptmann:    Rose  Bernd 
Sudermann:     Stein  unter  Steinen 
Schnitzler:     Das    Vermdchtnis 
Hartleben :    Hanna  Jagert 
Galsworthy:     The  Silver  Box 
Galsworthy :     Strife 
Galsworthy :     Justice 
Galsworthy :     The  Pigeon 

GROUP    II 

Plays  dealing  with  Marriage  and  Divorce. 

Ibsen:    A  Doll's  House 
Strindberg :     Comrades 
Strindberg :     The  Link 
Porto-Riche:    Amour  euse 
Brieux :     Le  Berceau 
Hervieu:     Les  Tenailles 
Hervieu:     LA(Loi  de  Vhomme 
Hervieu:     Le  Dedale 
Hervieu:     Le  Reveil 
Hervieu :     Connais-toi 


282  STUDY  LISTS 

Lemaitre:     Le  Pardon 

Sudermann:     Das  Gluck  im  Winkel 

Halbe :     Mutter  Erde 

Hirschf eld :     Zu  Hause 

Hartleben :    Die  Erziehung  zur  Eke 

Pinero:     The  Second  Mrs.  Tanqueray 

Shaw:     Getting  Married 

Shaw :     Candida 

Galsworthy :     The  Fugitive 

GROUP   III 

Plays  dealing  with  Sex. 

Ibsen:     Ghosts 

Bjornson:     A  Gauntlet 

Brieux:     The  Three  Daughters  of  M.  Dupont 

Brieux:     La  petite  Amie 

Brieux:    Damaged  Goods 

Brieux :     Maternity 

Donnay:     UAutre  Danger 

Hauptmann:     Gabriel  Schilling's  Flight 

Halbe :     Jugend 

Schnitzler:     Anatol 

Schnitzler :     Das  Mdrchen 

Schnitzler :     Liebelei 

Wedekind:     Friihlings  Erwachen 

Shaw:     Man  and  Superman 

Barker :     Waste 

Barker :     The  Madras  House 

GROUP   IV 

Plays  Dealing  with  the  Life  of  Art. 
Hauptmann :     The  Sunken  Bell 


STUDY  LISTS  283 

Hauptmann:     Michael  Kramer 
Hirschfeld:    Die  Mutter 
Hirschfeld:     Der  junge  Goldner 
Schnitzler :     Literatur 
Hofmannsthal :     Der  Tod  des  Tizian 
Yeats :     The  King's  Threshold 

GROUP   V 

Plays  Dealing  with  the  Life  of  Faith  and  of  the  Intellect* 

Ibsen :     Rosmersholm 

Bjornson:     Beyond  Our  Strength 

Brieux:     La  Foi 

Hauptmann:    Henry  of  Aue 

Halbe:     Das  tausendjdhrige  Reich 

Maeterlinck:     Les  Aveugles 

Rostand :     Chantecler 

Hofmannsthal :    Der  Tor  und  der  Tod 

C 
THE  UNITIES  IN  THE  MODERN  DRAMA 

GROUP   I 

Plays  Observing  the  Unity  of  Place 

Ibsen :     The  Pillars  of  Society 
Ibsen:    Hedda  G abler 
Zola:     Therese  Raquin 
Becque:     La  Parisienne 
De  Maupassant:     La  Paix  du  Menage 
Curel :     UEnvers  d'une  Sainte 
Curel :     Le  Coup  d'Aile 
Porto-Riche:     Amour  euse 


284  STUDY  LISTS 

Brieux:     Blanchette 

Brieux:     Le  Berceau 

Brieux:     Les  Hannetons 

Hervieu :     Connais-toi 

Lemaitre :    Le  Pardon 

Holz:    Die  Familie  Selicke 

Schlaf :     Meister  Oelze 

Hauptmann:     Lonely  Lives 

Hauptmann :    Drayman  Hensckel 

Sudermann :     Heimat 

Sudermann :    Johannisfeuer 

Halbe :     Jugend 

Dreyer :    Drei 

Dreyer :     Winterschlaf 

Rosmer :     Ddmmerung 

Schnitzler:     Das  Vermdchtnis 

Schnitzler :     Zwischenspiel 

Hartleben:     Angele 

Jones :     The  Triumph  of  the  Philistines 

Galsworthy:     The  Pigeon 

GROUP   II 

Plays  Observing  the  Unities  of  Time  and  Place. 

Ibsen :     Ghosts 
Ibsen :    A  Doll's  House 
Strindberg:     The  Father 
Strindberg :     Comrades 
Strindberg :     Miss  Julia 
Strindberg :     Creditors 
Strindberg:     The  Link 
Hervieu:     UEnigme 
Hauptmann:     The  Reconciliation 


STUDY  LISTS  285 

Halbe :    De r  Strom 
Shaw :     Candida 

(Mr.  Galsworthy's  Strife  observes  the  unity  of  time 
but  not  of  place.) 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY  OF  THE 
MODERN  DRAMA 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY  OF  THE 
MODERN  DRAMA 

THE  following  bibliography  lays  no  claim  to 
the  barren  virtue  of  mere  completeness  on  the 
side  of  biography  and  criticism.  Those  works 
have  been  selected  which  seemed  most  excellent 
and  authoritative.  I  have  made  every  effort,  on 
the  other  hand,  to  give  in  the  order  of  their  first 
appearance  in  any  form  the  works  of  all  the  play- 
wrights discussed  in  the  text  and  a  full  list  of  the 
existing  English  translations  of  foreign  plays. 
Except  in  the  case  of  Rostand,  however,  I  have 
not  held  it  necessary  to  give  several  versions  of 
the  same  play. 

In  so  considerable  an  array  of  names  and  dates 
dealing  with  a  contemporary  subject,  omissions 
and  inaccuracies— the  latter  due  sometimes  to  dis- 
agreement among  my  authorities — will  necessarily 
be  found.  I  shall  be  grateful  to  any  student  of 
the  subject  for  corrections  and  additions.  It  is 
obvious  that,  except  in  the  case  of  Chapter  Three, 
no  bibliographical  notes  could  be  given  for  the 
opening  section  on  each  chapter.  Hence,  in  order 

289 


290        CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

that  the  divisions  of  the  bibliography  may  cor- 
respond to  those  in  the  text,  the  bibliographical 
material  belonging  to  Chapters  One,  Two,  Four 
and  Five  begins  with  Section  II. 

It  is  a  noteworthy  fact  that  of  the  seven  books 
dealing  with  the  modern  drama  in  its  interna- 
tional aspect  all  but  one — that  of  Ashley  Dukes 
— are  of  American  origin.  The  seven  books  are: 
Edward  Everett  Hale,  Dramatists  of  To-day 
(1905),  James  Huneker,  Iconoclasts:  A  Book 
of  Dramatists  (1905),  Ashley  Dukes,  Modern 
Dramatists  (1911),  Archibald  Henderson,  Euro- 
pean Dramatists  (1913),  Barrett  H.  Clark,  The 
Continental  Drama  of  To-day  (1914),  Archibald 
Henderson,  The  Changing  Drama  (1914), 
Frank  Wadleigh  Chandler,  Aspects  of  Modern 
Drama  (1914).  These  books  vary  remarkably 
in  quality  and  range.  The  important  point  for 
us,  however,  is  that  the  volumes  of  Hale,  Huneker 
and  Dukes  consist  of  desultory  essays,  studies  and 
even  notes.  There  is  in  them  no  attempt  to  grasp 
the  subject  as  a  whole  or  to  give  any  reasoned  ac- 
count of  it.  It  is  otherwise  with  Professor  Hen- 
derson's The  Changing  Drama  and  Professor 
Chandler's  Aspects  of  Modern  Drama.  But  in 
these  books,  too,  the  method  is  not  historical  and 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY        291 

the  authors'  accounts  are  given  according  to  kinds 
and  tendencies,  or  in  Professor  Chandler's  words 
"dramatic  kinds  and  moods,"  and  not  at  all  ac- 
cording to  the  men  and  their  works  in  historical 
order,  national  groupings  and  against  the  back- 
ground of  contemporary  thought.  Mr.  Clark's 
volume  is  one  of  synopses  and  bibliographies. 
The  latter,  though  not  always  accurate,  are  ex- 
tremely useful  and  I  must  acknowledge  my  in- 
debtedness to  them  for  calling  my  attention  to 
several  English  versions  of  foreign  plays  which 
I  might  else  have  overlooked. 

NOTE. — I  have  become  much  indebted,  in  the  course  of  writ- 
ing this  bibliography,  to  Miss  Maud  Jeffrey  of  the  Ohio  State 
University  Library,  and  to  the  libraries  of  the  Universities  of 
Illinois,  Chicago  and  Wisconsin. 


CHAPTER  ONE 

THE   FOUNDATIONS  OF  THE   MODERN  DRAMA 
II 

A.    HENRIK  IBSEN 

CRITICISM  AND  BIOGRAPHY:  From  the  enor- 
mous mass  of  Ibsen  literature  a  rigid  selection 
is  all  that  need  be  given.  The  best  brief  biog- 
raphies are :  H.  Jaeger,  Henrik  Ibsen,  A  Crit- 
ical Biography  (1890),  and  Edmund  Gosse, 
Henrik  Ibsen  (1908);  the  fullest  is  U.  C. 
Worner,  Henrik  Ibsen  (2  vols.  1900).  Of 
critical  treatises  may  be  mentioned  the  brilliant 
and  sagacious  study  in  Heinrich  Bulthaupt's 
Dramaturgie  des  Schauspiels  (vol.  IV,  ed. 
1901),  B.  Litzmann,  Ibsen's  Dramen  (1900), 
Georg  Brandes,  Henrik  Ibsen9 — Bjornstjerne 
Bjornson  (Eng.  ed.  1899)  and  G.  B.  Shaw,  The 
Quintessence  of  Ibsenism  (Rev.  ed.  1913). 
WORKS:  Catalina,  1850;  The  Warrior's 
Mound,  1854;  LadY  Inger  °*  Ostrat,  1855; 
The  Feast  at  Solhaug,  1856;  Olaf  Liljekrans, 
1857;  The  Vikings  at  Helgeland,  1861 ;  Love's 
Comedy,  1862;  The  Pretenders,  1864;  Brand, 
1866;  Peer  Gynt,  1867;  The  League  of  Youth, 
1869;  Emperor  and  Galilean,  1873;  The  Pil- 
292 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY        293 

lars  of  Society,  1877;  A  Doll's  House,  1879; 
Ghosts,  1881;  An  Enemy  of  the  People,  1882; 
The  Wild  Duck.  i884/^KoTmersholm,  1886; 
The  Lady  from  the  Sea,  1888;  Hedda  Gabler, 
1890;  The  Masterbuilder,  1892;  Little  Eyolf, 
1894;  John  Gabriel  Borkman,  1896;  When  We 
Dead  Awaken,  1899. 

TRANSLATIONS  :  The  standard  edition  in  Eng- 
lish is  that  of  the  Collected  Works  edited  by 
William  Archer  (10  vols.  1910-1912).  The 
completest  edition  for  the  student  ignorant  of 
Norse  is  the  great  authorised  German  edition: 
Henrik  Ibsen's  sdmtliche  Werke  in  deutscher 
Sprache.  Durchgesehen  und  eingeleitet  von  G. 
Brandes,  J.  Elias,  P.  Schlenther  (10  vols.  n.d.). 

B.    BJORNSTJERNE  BJORNSON 

CRITICISM  AND  BIOGRAPHY:  A  full  but  un- 
critical biography  of  Bjornson  exists  in  C. 
Collin,  Bjornstjerne  Bjornson  (Germ.  ed. 
1903).  The  best  brief  account  in  English  is 
William  Morton  Payne,  Bjornstjerne  Bjornson 
(1910).  For  criticism  consult  G.  Brandes, 
Henrik  Ibsen — Bjornstjerne  Bjornson  (Eng.  ed. 
1899),  and  his  Menschen  und  Werke  (2nd  ed. 

1895). 

WORKS:  Between  the  Battles,  1858;  Lame 
Hulda,  1858;  King  Sverre,  1861;  Sigurd 
Slembe,  1862;  Mary  Stuart,  1864;  The  Newly 
Married  Couple,  1865;  Sigurd  Jorsalfar,  1872; 
The  Editor,  1874;  A  Bankruptcy,  1874;  The 


294       CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY; 

King,  1877;  Leonarda,  1879;  The  New  Sys- 
tem, 1879;  A  Gauntlet,  1883;  Beyond  Our 
Power,  Part  I,  1883;  Geography  and  Love, 
1885 ;  Beyond  Our  Power,  Part  II,  1895 ;  Paul 
Lange  and  Tora  Parsberg,  1898;  Laboremus, 
1901;  At  Storhove,  1904;  Daglarmet,  1904; 
When  the  New  Wine  Blooms,  1909. 
TRANSLATIONS:  The  fullest  English  edition 
of  Bjornson  is  that  edited  by  Edwin  Bjorkman: 
First  Series :  The  New  System,  The  Gauntlet, 
Beyond  Our  Power,  Part  I  (1913).  Second 
Series:  Love  and  Geography,  Beyond  Our 
Power,  Part  II,  Laboremus  (1914).  Three 
Comedies  by  Bjornson  (Everyman's  Library, 
1913),  edited  by  R.  F.  Sharp,  contains  The 
Newly  Married  Couple,  Leonarda,  A  Gauntlet. 
Sigurd  Slembe  is  translated  by  W.  M.  Payne 
(1910),  Mary,  Queen  of  Scots  by  A.  Sahlberg 
(1912),  and  When  the  New  Wine  Blooms  by 
Lee  M.  Hollander  (Poet  Lore,  1911). 

C.    AUGUST  STRINDBERG 

CRITICISM  AND  BIOGRAPHY:  A  fairly  full  ac- 
count of  Strindberg  in  English  is  to  be  found 
in  L.  Lind-af-Hageby,  August  Strindberg 
(1913).  Criticism  will  be  found  in  the  vol- 
umes of  Huneker,  Dukes  and  Henderson  and 
in  the  editorial  matter  of  the  English  editions 
cited  below. 

WORKS:  Hermione,  1869;  The  Outlaw,  1871 ; 
Master  Olaf,  1872;  The  Secret  of  the  Guild, 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY        295 

1880;  Sir  Bengt's  Lady,  1882;  The  Wander- 
ings of  Lucky  Per,  1883;  The  Father,  1887; 
Comrades,  1888;  Miss  Juliet,  1888;  Creditors, 
1890;  Pariah,  1890;  Samum,  1890;  The 
Stronger,  1890;  The  Keys  of  Heaven,  1892; 
The  First  Warning,  1893;  Debit  and  Credit, 
1893;  Mother  Love,  1893;  Facing  Death, 
1893;  Playing  with  Fire,  1897;  The  Link, 
1897;  To  Damascus,  I  and  II,  1898;  There 
are  Crimes  and  Crimes,  1899 ;  Christmas,  1899 ; 
Gustavus  Vasa,  1899;  Eric  xly»  l899>  The 
Saga  of  the  Folkungs,  1899;  Gustavus 
Adolphus,  1900;  The  Dance  of  Death,  I  and 
II,  1901;  Easter,  1901;  Midsummer,  1901; 
Engelbrecht,  1901;  Charles  XII,  1901;  The 
Crown  Bride,  1902;  Swan  white,  1902;  The 
Dream  Play,  1902;  Gustavus  III,  1903;  Queen 
Christina,  1903;  The  Nightingale  of  Witten- 
berg, 1903;  To  Damascus  III,  1904;  Storm, 
1907;  The  Burned  Lot,  1907;  The  Spook 
Sonata,  1907;  The  Pelican,  1907;  The  Slip- 
pers of  Abu  Casen,  1908;  The  Last  Knight, 
1908;  The  National  Director,  1909;  The  Earl 
of  Bjallbo,  1909;  The  Black  Glove,  1909;  The 
Great  Highway,  1909. 

TRANSLATIONS:  A  large  body  of  Strindberg's 
work  is  accessible  in  English  in  the  three  vol- 
umes edited  by  Edwin  Bjorkman :  First  Series  : 
The  Dream  Play,  The  Link,  The  Dance  of 
Death,  I  and  II  (1912).  Second  Series: 
There  are  Crimes  and  Crimes,  Miss  Julia,  The 


296        CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Stronger,  Creditors,  Pariah  (1913).  Third 
Series :  Swanwhite,  Simoom,  Debit  and  Credit, 
Advent,  The  Thunderstorm,  after  the  Fire 
(1913).  Of  equal  importance  are  the  two  vol- 
umes edited  by  E.  and  W.  Oland :  Vol.  1 : 
The  Father,  Countess  Julie,  The  Outlaw,  The 
Stronger.  Vol.  II:  Comrades,  Facing  Death, 
Pariah,  Easter  (1912).  Lucky  Pehr  is  trans- 
lated by  V.  S.  Howard  (1912). 

Ill 

PLAYS  OF  THE  FRENCH  NOVELISTS 

CRITICISM:  The  best  account  of  the  French 
drama  of  the  mid-century,  inclusive  of  Becque 
but  exclusive  of  his  successors,  is  probably  H. 
Parigot,  Le  Theatre  d'hier  (1893).  In  thor- 
ough touch  with  its  subject  is  Brander  Mat- 
thews' French  Dramatists  of  the  Nineteenth 
Century  (1881).  An  invaluable  summing  up 
of  the  drama  of  Augier  and  Dumas  fits  is  to 
be  found  in  G.  Lanson,  Histoire  de  la  littera- 
ture  frangaise  (nth  ed.  1909,  pp.  1060-1072) 
and  of  Sarcey's  theory  of  the  theatre  in  the 
same  work,  pp.  1116-1118.  An  excellent  ac- 
count on  a  larger  scale  is  Chapter  III  (Le 
Theatre}  in  Vol.  VIII  (Periode  contemporaine) 
of  L.  Petit  de  Julleville's  Histoire  de  la  langue 
et  de  la  litter ature  frangaise  (1899).  The  two 
volumes  of  Emile  Zola:  Le  Naturalisme  au 
theatre  (1881)  and  Nos  Auteurs  dramatiques 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY        297 

(1881)  are  of  interest  despite  Zola's  lack  of 
critical  equipment,  and  of  capital  importance 
are  Edmond  de  Goncourt's  Preface  to  Henriette 
Marechal  (ed.  of  1885),  the  account  in  the 
Journal  des  Goncourts  (Vol.  II,  pp.  261-332, 
ed.  of  1904)  and  Zola's  several  prefaces  in  his 
Theatre  (ed.  of  1907).  Notable  on  the  con- 
servative side,  more  important  in  France  than 
elsewhere,  is  the  study  La  Re  for  me  du  theatre 
in  Ferdinand  Brunetiere,  Essais  sur  la  littera- 
ture  contemporaine  (3rd  ed.  1896). 

A.  EDMOND  and  JULES  DE  GONCOURT 

WORKS  :  Henriette  Marechal,  1865 ;  La  Patrie 
en  Danger,  1868. 

B.  EMILE  ZOLA 

WORKS:  Therese  Raquin,  1873;  Les  Heritiers 
Rabourdin,  1874;  Le  Bouton  de  Rose,  1878. 

C.  ALPHONSE  DAUDET 

WORKS:  La  derniere  Idole,  1862;  Les  Ab- 
sents, 1864;  L'Oellet  blanc,  1865;  Le  Frere 
aine,  1867.  [These  four  are  plays  in  one  act.] 
Le  Sacrifice,  1869;  L'Arlesienne,  1872. 

D.  GUY  DE  MAUPASSANT 

WORKS:     Histoire  du  vieux  temps,  1879; 
sotte,  1891 ;  La  Paix  du  Menage,  1893. 


298        CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

IV 

HENRI  BECQUE 

CRITICISM:  Accounts  of  Becque's  work,  vary- 
ing in  value  will  be  found  in  the  books  of 
Parigot,  Huneker  and  Dukes.  Excellent  and 
searching  critical  discussions  occur  in  Augustin 
Filon,  De  Dumas  a  Rostand  (1898)  and  in  A. 
Sorel,  Essais  de  psychologic  dramatique  (1911). 
WORKS  :  Sardanapale,  1867 ;  L'Enf ant  prodi- 
gue,  1868;  Michel  Pauper,  1870;  La  Navette, 
1878;  Les  honettes  Femmes,  1880;  Les  Cor- 
beaux,  1882;  La  Parisienne,  1885. 
TRANSLATIONS:  The  Vultures  (Les  Cor- 
beaux),  The  Woman  of  Paris  (La  Parisienne) 
and  The  Merry-Go-Round  (La  Navette)  have 
been  translated  by  Freeman  Tilden.  (The 
Modern  Drama  Series,  1913.) 


THE  NEW  STAGES 

For  the  founding  and  character  of  Le  Theatre 
libre  consult  A.  Thalasso,  Le  Theatre  Libre  and 
Filon,  op.  cit.  The  origin  of  Die  Freie  Buhne 
is  discussed  by  one  of  its'  founders  in  Paul 
Schlenther,  Wozu  der  L'drm?  Genesis  der 
Freien  Buhne  (1889),  and  fully  described  by 
an  eye-witness  in  A.  von  Hanstein,  Das  jiingste 
Deutschland  (1901).  (Cf.  especially  Book  IV, 
Chapters  III,  IV,  and  V.) 


CHAPTER  TWO 

THE   REALISTIC   DRAMA   IN    FRANCE 

An  admirable  critical  literature  has  already 
grown  up  about  the  contemporary  theatre  in 
France.  The  basic  work  is  the  great  Impressions 
de  theatre  (10  vols.  1888  ff.)  of  Jules  Lemaitre. 
A  brief  summing  up  of  the  whole  movement  is 
found  in  G.  Lanson's  Histoire  de  la  litterature 
frangaise  (nth  ed.  1909),  pp.  1122-1127,  and 
an  equally  excellent  one  on  a  larger  scale  in 
Georges  Pelissiefs  Le  Mouvement  litteraire  con- 
temporain  (Chapter  II,  Le  The'dtre,  1901). 
Consult  also  Petit  de  Julleville,  Histoire  de  la 
langue  et  de  la  litterature  frangaise.  Loc. 
cit.  Highly  suggestive,  though  somewhat  desul- 
tory, are  Rene  Doumic,  De  Scribe  a  Ibsen  (1901) 
and  again,  Augustin  Filon,  De  Dumas  a  Rostand 
(1898).  Excellent  for  a  detailed  understanding 
of  the  period  is  Henry  Bordeaux,  La  Vie  au 
Theatre  (3  vols.  1910-1913).  More  systematic 
and,  indeed,  invaluable  are:  Rene  Doumic,  Le 
Theatre  nouveau  (1908),  dealing  with  Hervieu, 

299 


300        CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Lavedan,  Lemaitre,  Curel,  Brieux,  Donnay;  A. 
Sorel,  Essais  de  psychologie  dramatique  (1911), 
dealing  with  the  same  playwrights  and  also  with 
Becque  and  Porto-Riche,  and  Paul  Flat,  Figures 
du  theatre  contemporain  (2  vols.  1912-13),  dis- 
cussing the  same  group  minus  Becque  and  Lavedan 
but  including  several  of  the  neo-romantics. 
Studies  of  Brieux  and  Hervieu  may  also  be  found 
in  Dukes  and  Huneker,  and  of  Brieux  in  the  edi- 
torial matter  of  the  English  editions  cited  below. 

II 

A.  GEORGES  DE  PORTO-RICHE 

WORKS:  La  Chance  de  Fran^oise,  1889;  L'ln- 
fidele,  1890;  Amoureuse,  1891 ;  Le  Passe,  1902; 
Le  vieil  Homme,  1911. 

TRANSLATIONS:  Frangoise'  Luck  (La  Chance 
de  Frangoise)  in  Barrett  H.  Clark's  Four  Plays 
by  Curel,  etc.  (1914). 

B.  FRANCOIS  DE  CUREL 

WORKS:  L'Envers  d'une  Sainte,  1892;  Les 
Fossiles,  1892 ;  L'Invitee,  1893  5  L' Amour  brode, 
1893;  La  nouvelle  Idole,  1895;  La  Figurante, 
1896;  Le  Repas  du  Lion,  1897;  La  Fille  sauv- 
age,  1902;  Le  Coup  d'aile,  1906. 
TRANSLATIONS:  The  Beat  of  a  Wing  (Le 
Coup  d'aile),  translated  by  Alice  Van  Kaath- 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY        301 

oven  (Poet  Lore),  1909.  The  Fossils  (Les 
Fossiles)  in  Barrett  H.  Clark's  Four  Plays  by 
Curel,  etc.  (1914). 

Ill 
HENRI  LAVEDAN 

WORKS:  Une  Famille,  1890;  Le  Prince 
d'Aurec,  1892;  Les  deux  Noblesses,  1894; 
Viveurs,  1895;  Catherine,  1898;  Le  nouveau 
Jeu,  1898;  Le  vieux  Marcheur,  1899;  Le  Mar- 
quis de  Priola,  1902;  Le  Duel,  1905;  Sire, 
1909;  Le  Gout  du  Vice,  1911;  Servir,  1913. 
TRANSLATIONS  :  Le  Prince  d'Aurec  is  trans- 
lated by  B.  H.  Clark  in  Three  Modern  Plays 
from  the  French,  1914. 

IV 

A.    EUGENE  BRIEUX 

WORKS:  Menages  d' Artistes,  1890;  Blanch- 
ette,  1892;  La  Couvee,  1894;^  L'Engrenage, 
1894;  Les  Bienfaiteurs,  1896;  L'Evasion,  1896; 
Le  Berceau,  1898;  Resultats  des  Courses,  1898; 
Les  Trois  Filles  de  M.  Dupont,  1899  5  La  Robe 
rouge,  1900;  Les  Remplagantes,  1901;  Les 
A  varies,  1902;  La  petite  Ami,  1902;  Mater  nite, 
1904;  Les  Hannetons,  1906;  La  Frangaise, 
1907;  Simone,  1908;  Suzette,  1909;  La  Foi, 
1910;  La  Femme  seule,  1912. 
TRANSLATIONS:  Two  volumes  of  Brieux' 
plays  translated  by  various  hands  and  vigor- 


302        CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY, 

ously  edited  by  George  Bernard  Shaw  have 
appeared.  Vol.  I  (1911),  contains:  The 
Three  Daughters  of  M.  Dupont,  Damaged 
Goods  (Les  Avaries)  and  Maternity.  Vol.  II 
(1914),  contains  The  Red  Robe  (La  Robe 
rouge),  The  Independent  Woman  (La  Femme 
seule)  and  Faith  (La  Foi).  In  addition 
Blanchette  and  The  Escape  (L'Evasion)  have, 
appeared  in  English  with  a  judicious  preface 
by  H.  L.  Mencken  (1913). 

B.    PAUL  HERVIEU 

WORKS:  Les  Paroles  restent,  1892;  Les 
Tenailles,  1895 ;  La  Loi  de  I'Homme,  1897 ; 
L'Enigme,  1901 ;  La  Course  du  Flambeau,  1901 ; 
Theroigne  de  Mericourt,  1902 ;  Le  Dedale, 
1903;  Le  Re  veil,  1905;  Modestie,  1908;  Con- 
nais-toi,  1909;  Bagatelle,  1912. 
TRANSLATIONS:  The  Labyrinth  (Le  Dedale) 
has  been  translated  with  good  biographical  and 
bibliographical  notes  by  B.  H.  Clark  and  L. 
MacClintock,  1913;  Modesty  (one  act)  by  B. 
H.  Clark,  1913,  and  In  Chains  (Les  Tenailles) 
by  Ysidor  Asckenasy  (Poet  Lore),  1909. 


A.    JULES  LEMAITRE 

WORKS:  Revoltee,  1889;  Le  Depute  Leveau, 
1890;  Manage  blanc,  1891 ;  Flipote,  1893;  Les 
Rois,  1893;  L'Age  difficile,  1895;  Le  Pardon, 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY        303 

1895;  La  bonne  Helene,  1896;  L'Ainee,  1898; 
La  Massiere,  1905;  Bertrade,  1906. 
TRANSLATIONS:     The  Pardon  is  translated  by 
B.  H.  Clark  in  Three  Modern  Plays  from  the 
French  (1914). 

B.    MAURICE  DONNAY 

WORKS:  Lysistrata,  1892;  Folle  Entreprise, 
1894;  Amants,  1895;  La  Douloureuse,  1897; 
L'Affranchie,  1898;  Georgette  Lemeunier,  1898; 
Le  Torrent,  1899;  Education  de  Prince,  1900; 
La  Bascule,  1901;  L'autre  Danger,  1902;  Le 
Re  tour  de  Jerusalem,  1902;  L'Escalade,  1904; 
Paraitre,  1906;  La  Patronne,  1908;  Le  Menage 
de  Moliere,  1912;  Les  Eclaireuses,  1913. 
TRANSLATIONS:  The  Other  Danger  (L'autre 
Danger)  is  translated  by  Charlotte  T.  David  in 
Three  Modern  Plays  from  the  French  (1914). 


CHAPTER  THREE 

THE    NATURALISTIC    DRAMA    IN    GERMANY 

The  best  book  on  all  phases  of  modern  German 
literature  is  the  lamented  Richard  Moritz  Meyer's 
Die  deutsche  Literatur  des  neunzehnten  Jahrhun- 
derts  (4th  ed.  1910).  It  contains  a  full  treat- 
ment of  the  modern  drama.  Of  little  critical 
value  but  packed  with  useful  information  is  F. 
Kummer's  Deutsche  Literaturgeschichte  des  neun- 
zehnten  Jahrhunderts  (1909).  A  good  manual 
exists  in  Georg  Witkowski's  Das  deutsche  Drama 
des  neunzehnten  Jahrhunderts  (2nd  ed.  1906; 
Eng.  ed.  1909).  S.  Friedmann's  Das  deutsche 
Drama  des  neunzehnten  Jahrhunderts^  Neuere 
und  neuste  Zeit  (ilth  ed.  1904),  is  sound  and 
trustworthy  for  the  playwrights  discussed.  Edgar 
Steiger's  Das  Werden  des  neueren  Dramas  (2 
vols.  1903)  is  subtle  and  suggestive  but  highly 
personal.  Admirable  though  somewhat  anti- 
quated now  is  Berthold  Litzmann's  Das  deutsche 
Drama  in  den  literarischen  Bewegungen  der  Ge- 
genwart  (4th  ed.  1897).  The  best  book  on  the 

304 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY        305 

modern  drama  in  any  language  is  Robert  F.  Ar- 
nold's Das  moderne  Drama  (1908).  The  author 
combines  exhaustive  learning  with  fine  critical 
taste  and  great  charm  of  style.  Although  he 
avowedly  stresses  the  German  drama,  he  treats 
every  modern  playwright  of  note.  No  one  can 
work  in  this  field  without  becoming  deeply  in- 
debted to  Arnold.  A  delightful  personal  com- 
mentary on  the  whole  German  movement  will  be 
found  in  Adalbert  von  Hanstein's  Das  jiingste 
Deutschland  (1901).  Discussions  of  individual 
playwrights,  especially  of  Hauptmann  and  Suder- 
mann,  occur  in  many  collections  of  studies.  A 
few  of  these  may  be  mentioned:  Georg  Brandes, 
Menschen  und  Werke  (2nd  ed.  1895);  Heinrich 
Bulthaupt,  Dramaturgic  des  Schauspiels  (vol.  IV, 
1901) ;  Moeller  van  den  Bruck,  Die  Zeitgenossen 
(1906);  Kuno  Francke,  Glimpses  of  Modern 
German  Culture  (1898);  Otto  Heller,  Studies  in 
Modern  German  Literature  (1905). 

I 

A.  ARNO  HOLZ  and  JOHANNES  SCHLAF 

WORKS  :     Die  Familie  Selicke,  1890. 

B.  ARNO  HOLZ 

WORKS:     Sozialaristokraten,  1896;  Traumulus 
(with  O.  Jerschke),  1904. 


306        CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

C.    JOHANNES  SCHLAF 

WORKS:  Meister  Oelze,  1892;  Gertrud,  1898; 
Die  Feindlichen,  1899;  Weigand,  1906. 

II 

GERHART  HAUPTMANN 

CRITICISM  AND  BIOGRAPHY:  The  best-known 
monographs  on  Hauptmann  are  Paul  Schlenth- 
er's  Gerhart  Hauptmann^  Sein  Lebensgang  und 
seine  Dichtung  (Neue  gdnzlich  nmgearbeitete 
Ausgabe^  6th  ed.  1912),  and  Adolf  Bartel's 
Gerhart  Hauptmann  (2nd  ed.  1906).  The  first 
is  authoritative;  the  second,  like  all  of  BarteUs 
writings,  is  to  be  viewed  with  extreme  suspicion. 
Briefer  volumes  are:  Karl  Holl,  Gerhart 
Hauptmann  (Eng.  ed.  1913),  E.  Sulger- 
Gebing,  Gerhart  Hauptmann  (1909),  A.  von 
Hanstein,  Gerhart  Hauptmann  (1898)  and  U. 
C.  Worner,  Gerhart  Hauptmann  (2nd  ed. 
1901).  A  very  elaborate  analysis  of  all  the 
plays  exists  in  Kurt  Sternberg's  Gerhart  Haupt- 
mann,  Der  Entwicklungsgang  seiner  Dichtungen 
(1910).  Criticism  of  Hauptmann  is  found  in 
all  the  works  on  modern  German  literature  cited 
above,  as  well  as  in  the  volumes  of  Huneker, 
Dukes,  Hale,  Henderson,  Chandler  and  in  the 
introductions  to  the  English  edition  cited  be- 
low. 

WORKS:  Vor  Sonnenaufgang,  1889;  ^as 
Friedensfest,  1890;  Einsame  Menschen,  1891; 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY        307 

Die  Weber,  1892;  College  Crampton,  1892; 
Der  Biberpelz,  1893;  Hannele,  1893;  Florian 
Geyer,  1896;  Die  versunkene  Glocke,  1896; 
Fuhrmann  Henschel,  1898;  Schluck  und  Jau, 
1899;  Michael  Kramer,  1900;  Der  rote  Hahn, 
1901;  Der  arme  Heinrich,  1902;  Rose  Bernd, 
1903;  Elga,  1905;  Die  Jungfern  vom  Bischofs- 
berg,  1907;  Kaiser  Karls  Geisel,  1908;  Gri- 
selda,  1909;  Die  Ratten,  1911;  Gabriel  Schill- 
ings Flucht,  1912;  Festspiel,  1913;  Der  Bogen 
des  Odysseus,  1914. 

TRANSLATIONS:  The  dramatic  Works  of  Ger- 
hart  Hauptmann  (1912-1915),  edited  and 
chiefly  translated  by  Ludwig  Lewisohn,  now 
extends  to  five  volumes.  The  sixth  volume,  to 
be  issued  shortly,  includes  the  later  plays  in 
prose.  A  seventh  volume  will  include  the  later 
plays  in  verse.  It  is  the  aim  qf  this  edition  to 
make  Hauptmann  as  accessible  as  Ibsen  to  the 
English  reading  public. 

Ill 

HERMANN  SUDERMANN 

WORKS  :  Die  Ehre,  1889 ;  Sodoms  Ende,  1891 ; 
Heimat,  1893;  Die  Schmetterlingsschlacht, 
1895;  Das  Gliick  im  Winckel,  1896;  Morituri 
(Teja,  Fritzchen,  Das  ewig  Mannliche),  1897; 
Johannes,  1898;  Die  drei  Reiherfedern,  1899; 
Johannesfeuer,  1900;  Es  lebe  das  Leben,  1902; 
Der  Sturmgeselle  Sokrates,  1903;  Stein  unter 


308       CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Steinen,  1905;  Das  Blumenboot,  1905;  Rosen 
(Die  Lichtstreifen,  Margot,  Der  letzte  Besuch, 
Die  feme  Prinzessin),  1907;  Strandkinder, 
1910;  Der  Bettler  von  Syrakus,  1911 ;  Der  gute 
Ruf,  1912. 

TRANSLATIONS:  Magda  (Heimat)  is  trans- 
lated by  C.  E.  A.  Winslow  (1895),  John  the 
Baptist  (Johannes)  by  Beatrice  Marshall 
(1908),  The  Three  Heron's  Feathers  (Die  drei 
Reiherfedern),  by  Helen  T.  Porter  (Poet  Lore; 
in  prose  (!)  1900),  The  Fires  of  St.  John 
(Johannesfeuer),  by  Charles  Swickard  (1904), 
The  Joy  of  Living  (Es  lebe  das  Leben),  by 
Edith  Wharton  (1903),  Roses  (Rosen),  by 
Grace  Frank  (1909)  and  Morituri,  by  Archi' 
bald  Alexander  (1910). 

IV 
A.    MAX  HALBE 

WORKS:  Ein  Emporkommling,  1889;  Freie 
Liebe,  1890;  Eisgang,  1892;  Jugend,  1893;  -^er 
Amerikafahrer,  1894;  Lebenswende,  1896; 
Mutter  Erde,  1897;  Der  Eroberer,  1899;  ^e 
Heimatlosen,  1899;  Das  tausendjahrige  Reich, 
1900;  Haus  Rosenhagen,  1901;  Walpurgis- 
nacht,  1903;  Der  Strom,  1904;  Die  Insel  der 
Seligen,  1906;  Das  wahre  Gesicht,  1907;  Blaue 
Berge,  1909;  Der  Ring  des  Gauklers,  1912; 
Freiheit,  1914. 
TRANSLATIONS:  The  Rosenhagens  (Haus  Ro- 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY        309 

senhagen),  translated  by  Paul  H.  Grumann 
(Poet  Lore,  1910). 

B.  GEORG  HIRSCHFELD 

WORKS:  Zu  Hause,  1896;  Die  Mutter,  1896; 
Agnes  Jordan,  1898;  Pauline,  1899;  Der  junge 
Goldner,  1901;  Der  Weg  zum  Licht,  1902; 
Nebeneinander,  1 904 ;  Spatf  riihling,  1 906 ; 
Mieze  und  Maria,  1907;  Das  zweite  Leben, 
1910. 

C.  MAX  DREYER 

WORKS:  Drei,  1892;  Winterschlaf,  1895; 
Eine,  1896;  In  Behandlung,  1897;  Grossmama, 
1897 ;  Liebestraume,  Hans,  Unter  blonden 
Bestien,  all  1898;  Der  Probekandidat,  1899; 
Der  Sieger,  1900;  Schelmenspiele,  1901;  Stich- 
wahl,  1902;  Das  Tal  des  Lebens,  1902;  Die 
Siebzehnjahrigen,  1904;  Venus  Amathusia, 
1905;  Die  Hochzeitsfackel,  1906;  Des  Pfarrers 
Tochter  von  Streladorf,  1909;  Der  lachelnde 
Knabe,  1911;  Die  Frau  Des  Kommandeurs, 
1912;  Der  griinende  Zweig,  1913. 


A.    OTTO  ERICH  HARTLEBEN 

WORKS:  Der  Frosch,  1889;  Angele,  1891; 
Hanna  Jagert,  1893;  I-^e  Erziehung  zur  Ehe, 
1893;  Ein  Ehrenwort,  1894;  ^e  sittliche  For- 
derung,  1897;  Die  Befreiten,  1898;  Ein  wahr- 
haft  guter  Mensch,  1899;  Rosenmontag,  1901; 


310        CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Im  griinen  Baum  zur  Nachtigal,  1905; 
Diogenes,  1905. 

TRANSLATIONS:  Hanna  Jagert,  translated  by 
Sarah  E.  Holmes  (Poet  Lore,  1913). 

B.    FRANK  WEDEKIND 

WORKS:  Friihlings  Erwachen,  1891;  Erd- 
geist,  1895;  I^er  Liebestrank,  1899;  Der  Kam- 
mersanger,  1900;  Marquis  von  Keith,  1900;  Die 
Biichse  der  Pandora,  1903;  Hidalla,  1904;  To- 
tentanz,  1906;  Musik,  1907;  So  ist  das  Leben, 
1907;  Die  Zensur,  1908;  Oaha,  1908;  Der 
Stein  der  Weisen,  1909;  In  alien  Satteln 
gerecht,  1910;  Mit  alien  Hunden  gehetzt, 
1910;  In  alien  Wassern  gewaschen,  1910; 
Franziska,  1912. 

TRANSLATIONS:  The  Awakening  of  Spring 
(Friihlings  Erwachen)  is  translated  by  F.  J. 
Ziegler  (1910),  The  Heart  of  the  Tenor  (Der 
Kammersanger)  is  adapted  by  Andre  Tridon 
(Smart  Set,  1913),  and  Such  is  Life  (So  ist  das 
Leben)  is  translated  by  F.  J.  Ziegler  (1912). 

VI 

ARTHUR  SCHNITZLER 

WORKS:  Anatol,  1889;  Das  Marchen,  1891; 
Liebelei,  1894;  Freiwild,  1896;  Das  Vermacht- 
nis,  1897;  Der  grime  Kakadu  (Der  grime  Ka- 
kadu,  Paracelsus,  Die  Gefahrtin),  1898;  Der 
Schleier  der  Beatrice,  1899;  Lebendige  Stunden 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY        311 

(Lebendige  Stunden,  Die  Frau  mit  dem  Dolche, 
Die  letzten  Masken,  Literatur),  1901;  Der 
einsame  Weg,  1903;  Zwischenspiel,  1904; 
Marionetten  (Der  Puppenspieler,  Der  tap  fere 
Cassian,  Zum  grossen  Wurstel),  1904;  Der 
Ruf  des  Lebens,  1905;  Komtesse  Mizzi,  1909; 
Der  junge  Medardus,  1909;  Das  weite  Land, 
1910;  Professor  Bernhardi,  1912. 
TRANSLATIONS  :  Anatol  has  been  gracefully 
adapted  by  Granville  Barker.  Light  o*  Love 
(Liebelei)  is  translated  by  B.  Q.  Morgan  (The 
Drama,  1912)  ;  The  Green  Cockatoo,  Paracelsus 
and  The  Mate,  by  H.  B.  Samuel  (1913)  ;  The 
Legacy  (Das  Vermiichtnis),  by  Mary  L. 
Stephenson  (Poet  Lore,  1911)  ;  The  Lady  with 
the  Dagger  (Die  Frau  mit  dem  Dolche),  by 
Helen  T.  Porter  (Poet  Lore,  1904),  and  Living 
Hours  (Lebendige  Stunden),  by  the  same  (Poet 
Lore,  1906).  The  Lonely  Way,  Interlude  and 
Countess  Mizzi  (Der  einsame,  Weg,  Zwischen- 
spiel, Komtesse  Mizzi)  translated  by  Edwin 
Bjorkman  form  a  volume  in  the  Modern 
Drama  Series  (1914),  and  Professor  Bernhardi 
appears  in  a  much  abbreviated  and  badly  dis- 
figured version  by  Mrs.  Emil  Pohli  (1913). 


CHAPTER  FOUR 

THE    RENAISSANCE   OF   THE    ENGLISH    DRAMA 

Owing  partly  to  the  recent  appearance  of  a  mod- 
ern movement  in  the  English  drama  and  partly 
to  the  unfortunate  tradition  which,  in  England 
and  America,  denies  living  artists  and  their  audi- 
ences the  benefit  of  serious  criticism,  no  satisfac- 
tory account  of  the  subject  matter  of  this  chapter 
has  hitherto  been  written.  Mario  Borsa's  The 
English  Stage  of  To-day  (1908)  suffers  from  its 
foreign  authorship.  So  does  Augustin  Filon's 
The  English  Stage  (1897).  The  latter  volume, 
in  addition,  was  written  before  the  modern  thea- 
tre had  produced  its  more  notable  work.  The 
two  volumes  of  Mr.  Henry  Arthur  Jones,  The 
Renascence  of  the  English  Drama  (1895)  and 
The  Foundations  of  a  National  Drama  (1913) 
betray  on  every  page  their  author's  abiding  in- 
tellectual immaturity  and  his  dedication  to  out- 
worn theatricalism.  The  soundest  work  on  the 
modern  drama  in  England  is  to  be  found  in  sev- 

312 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY        313 

eral  collections  of  theatrical  criticism.  In  these 
briefer  or  longer  reviews  one  may  find  an  intelli- 
gent, sometimes  a  brilliant  and  acute  commentary 
on  the  recent  development  of  the  English  theatre. 
The  volumes  in  question  are:  William  Archer, 
The  Theatrical  World  (5  vols.  1893-1897); 
George  Bernard  Shaw,  Dramatic  Opinions  and 
Essays  (2  vols.  1906) ;  C.  E.  Montague,  Drama- 
tic Values  (1911);  A.  B.  Walkley,  The  Drama 
and  Life  (1911). 

II 

A.    HENRY  ARTHUR  JONES 

WORKS:  A  Clerical  Error,  1879;  The  Silver 
King,  1882;  Saints  and  Sinners,  1884;  The 
Middleman,  1889;  Judah,  1890;  The  Dancing 
Girl,  1891;  The  Crusaders,  1891;  The  Bauble 
Shop,  1893;  The  Tempter,  1893;  The  Mas- 
queraders,  1894;  The  Case  of  Rebellious  Susan, 
1894;  The  Triumph  of  the  Philistines,  1895; 
Michael  and  His  Lost  Angel,  1896;  The 
Rogue's  Comedy,  1896;  The  Physician,  1897; 
The  Liars,  1897;  The  Manoeuvres  of  Jane, 
1898;  Carnac  Sahib,  1899;  The  Lackay's  Car- 
nival, 1900;  Mrs.  Dane's  Defence,  1900;  The 
Princess'  Nose,  1902;  Chance,  1902;  The  Idol, 
1902;  The  Whitewashing  of  Julia,  1903; 
Joseph  Entangled,  1904;  The  Chevalier,  1904; 
The  Heroic  Stubbs,  1906;  The  Hypocrites, 


314        CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1906;  The  Evangelist,  1907;  Dolly  Reforms 
Herself,  1908;  The  Knife,  1909;  We  Can't  Be 
As  Bad  As  All  That,  1910;  The  Fall  in 
Rookies,  1910;  The  Ogre,  1911;  The  Divine 
Gift,  1913;  Mary  Goes  First,  1913;  The  Lie, 
1914. 

B.    ARTHUR  WING  PINERO 

WORKS  :  Two  Hundred  a  Year,  1877 ;  Daisy's 
Escape,  1879;  Hester's  Mystery,  1880;  By- 
gones, 1880;  The  Money  Spinner,  1880;  Im- 
prudence, 1881 ;  The  Squire,  1881 ;  The  Rector, 
1882;  The  Rocket,  1883;  Lords  and  Commons, 
1883;  Low  Water,  1884;  The  Weaker  Sex, 
1884;  The  Magistrate,  1885;  The  Schoolmis- 
tress, 1886;  The  Hobby-Horse,  1886;  Dandy 
Dick,  1887;  Sweet  Lavender,  1888;  The  Profli- 
gate, 1889;  The  Cabinet  Minister,  1890;  Lady 
Bountiful,  1891 ;  The  Times,  1891 ;  The  Ama- 
zons, 1893  >  The  Second  Mrs.  Tanqueray,  1893 ; 
The  Notorious  Mrs.  Ebbsmith,  1895;  The 
Benefit  of  the  Doubt,  1895;  The  Princess  and 
the  Butterfly,  1897;  Trelawney  of  the  Wells, 
1898;  The  Gay  Lord  Quex,  1899;  Iris,  1901; 
Letty,  1903;  A  Wife  without  a  Smile,  1904; 
His  House  in  Order,  1906;  The  Thunderbolt, 
1908;  Mid-Channel,  1909;  Preserving  Mr. 
Panmure,  1911;  The ,"  Mind  the  Paint"  Girl, 
1912;  The  Widow  of  Wasdale  Head,  1912. 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY        315 

III 
OSCAR  WILDE 

WORKS:  Vera,  1882;  The  Duchess  of  Padua, 
1891;  Lady  Windermere's  Fan,  1892;  A 
Woman  of  No  Importance,  1893;  Salome: 
Drame  en  un  acte,  1893 ;  The  Ideal  Husband, 
1895;  The  Importance  of  Being  Earnest,  1895. 

IV 

GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

CRITICISM  AND  BIOGRAPHY:  Archibald  Hen- 
derson's George  Bernard  Shaw:  His  Life  and 
Works  (1911),  is  interesting  and  valuable; 
Gilbert  K.  Chesterton's  George  Bernard  Shaw 
(1910),  is  brilliant  and  suggestive,  but  essen- 
tially uncritical  and  polemic.  Notable  is 
Joseph  McCabe's  George  Bernard  Shaw:  A 
Critical  Study  (1914). 

WORKS:  Widowers'  Houses,  1892;  The  Phi- 
landerer, 1893;  Mrs.  Warren's  Profession, 
1893;  Arms  and  the  Man,  1894;  Candida, 
1894;  The  Man  of  Destiny,  1895;  You  Never 
Can  Tell,  1896.  (These  seven  plays  compose 
the  two  volumes  of  Plays  Pleasant  and  Un- 
pleasant, 1898.)  The  Devil's  Disciple,  1897; 
Caesar  and  Cleopatra,  1898;  Captain  Brass- 
bound's  Conversion,  1899.  (These  three  plays 
compose  the  volume:  Three  Plays  for  Puri- 
tans, 1900.)  Man  and  Superman,  1903;  John 
Bull's  Other  Island,  1904;  How  he  lied  to  her 


316        CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Husband,  1904;  Major  Barbara,  1905;  The 
Doctor's  Dilemma,  1906;  Getting  Married, 
1908;  The  Shewing  up  of  Blanco  Posnet,  1909; 
Press-Cuttings,  1909;  The  Dark  Lady  of  the 
Sonnets,  1910;  Misalliance,  1910;  Fanny's  First 
Play,  1911;  Androcles  and  the  Lion,  1912; 
Pygmalion,  1912;  Overruled,  1912. 


A.  GRANVILLE  BARKER 

WORKS:  The  Marrying  of  Anne  Leete,  1899; 
The  Voysey  Inheritance,  1905;  Waste,  1907; 
The  Madras  House,  1909. 

B.  JOHN  GALSWORTHY 

WORKS:  The  Silver  Box,  1906;  Joy,  1907; 
Strife,  1909;  The  Eldest  Son,  1909;  Justice, 
1910;  The  Little  Dream,  1911;  The  Pigeon, 
1912;  The  Fugitive,  1913;  The  Mob,  1914. 


CHAPTER  FIVE 

THE    NEO-ROMANTIC    MOVEMENT    IN    THE    EURO- 
PEAN   DRAMA 

The  neo-romantic  drama  is  here  surveyed  as  a 
whole  for  the  first  time.  There  is  abundant  ma- 
terial, however,  for  a  study  of  the  larger  literary 
movement  from  which  it  sprang.  The  best  book 
in  English  is  Arthur  Symons'  The  Symbolist 
Movement  in  Literature  (2nd  ed.  rev.  1908). 
Very  useful  and  containing  good  bibliographical 
material  is  Andre  Barre's  Le  Symbolisme  (1912). 
Of  the  utmost  importance  are  single  passages  and 
whole  studies  too  numerous  to  specify  (vide, 
passim,  e.g.,  the  exquisite  exercitation  on  faith, 
Vol.  Ill,  p.  329)  in  Jules  Lemaitre,  Les  Contem- 
'fiorains  (6  vols.  1886-1896).  An  admirably 
philosophic  exposition  of  the  protest  against  the 
positivistic  basis  of  naturalism  will  be  found  in 
the  opening  essay,  Le  Pessimisms  contemporain, 
of  Georges  Pelissier's  Essais  de  litterature  con- 
tern  poraine  (1893).  Further  documents  of  cap- 
ital importance  are:  Jules  Huret,  Enquete  sur 

317 


318        CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

L*  Evolution  litter  air  e  (1891);  Anatole  France, 
La  Vie  litter  air  e  (4  vols.  n.d.;  articles  contributed 
to  Le  Temps.,  1887-1893)  ;  Hugo  von  Hofmanns- 
thal,  Die  Prosaischen  Schriften  (2  vols.  1907) 
and  W.  B.  Yeats,  The  Celtic  Twilight  (1893) 
and  Ideas  of  Good  and  Evil  (1903),  now  form- 
ing volumes  IV  and  V  of  his  Collected  Works  in 
Verse  and  Prose  (8  vols.,  1908  ff).  Full  discus- 
sion of  Rostand  will  be  found  in  the  works  of 
Doumic,  Filon  and  Paul  Flat  cited  under  Chap- 
ter Two,  and  of  Hauptmann  and  Hofmannsthal 
in  the  works  of  Meyer  and  Arnold  cited  under 
Chapter  Three.  For  the  rise  of  neo-romanticism 
in  Germany  consult  A.  von  Hanstein,  Das  j tings te 
Deutschland  (1901),  especially  Book  Six.  A 
highly  specialised  critical  literature  has  grown  up 
about  the  Irish  movement.  The  chief  documents 
are:  H.  S.  Krans,  William  Butler  Teats  and  the 
Irish  Literary  Movement  (1904);  W.  B..  Yeats, 
J.  M.  Synge  and  the  Ireland  of  His  Time  (1911); 
F.  Bickley,  J.  M.  Synge  and  the  Irish  Dramatic 
Movement  (1912);  Lady  Gregory,  Our  Irish 
Theatre,  A  Chapter  of  Autobiography  (1913); 
Cornelius  Weygandt,  Irish  Plays  and  Playwrights 
(1913).  An  intelligent  brief  account  of  the 
movement  will  be  found  in  Oliver  Elton's  Mod- 
ern Studies,  pp.  285-320  (1907). 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY        319 

II 

MAURICE  MAETERLINCK 

CRITICISM  AND  BIOGRAPHY:  It  would  be  un- 
profitable to  make  more  than  a  small  selection 
from  the  mass  of  critical  material  on  Maeter- 
linck. An  excellent  discussion  will  be  found 
in  Arnold's  Das  moderne  Drama  (vide  supra) 
and  in  Flat's  Figures  de  Theatre  contemporain, 
Vol.  2  (vide  supra).  Other  noteworthy  studies 
are  W.  L.  Courtney,  The  Development  of  Man- 
rice  Maeterlinck  and  Other  Studies  (1904),  J. 
Buschmann,  Maurice  Maeterlinck  (Vol.  54  of 
H.  Graef's  Beitrdge  zur  Literaturgeschichte, 
1908),  and  in  Archibald  Henderson's  Interpre- 
ters of  the  Modern  Spirit  (1911).  See,  also, 
Huneker,  Dukes,  Hale,  Henderson  and  Chand- 
ler. For  further  books,  essays  and  articles  con- 
sult the  full  bibliography  in  Jethro  Bithell, 
The  Life  and  Writings  of  Maurice  Maeterlinck 
(Great  Writers,  1913). 

WORKS:  La  Princesse  Maleine,  1889;  LTn- 
truse,  1890;  Les  Aveugles,  1890;  Les  sept 
Princesses,  1891;  Pelleas  et  Melisande,  1892; 
Alladine  et  Palomides,  1894;  Interieur,  1894; 
Le  Mort  de  Tintagiles,  1894;  Aglavaine  et 
Selysette,  1896;  Ariane  et  Barbe-bleu,  1901; 
Soeur  Beatrice,  1901;  Monna  Vanna,  1902; 
Joyzelle,  1903;  L'Oiseau  bleu,  1909;  Maria 
Magdalene,  1910. 
TRANSLATIONS:  The  eight  plays  from  La 


320        CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Princesse  Maleine  through  Le  Mort  de  Tinta- 
giles  were  all  exquisitely  rendered  into  Eng- 
lish by  the  late  Richard  Hovey  and  are  obtain- 
able in  the  uniform  edition  of  1911.  Aglavaine 
and  Selysette  is  translated  by  Alfred  Sutro 
(1911),  Ariane  and  Bluebeard  and  Sister  Bea- 
trice, by  Bernard  Miall  (1902),  Monna  Vanna, 
by  A.  I.  duP.  Coleman  (1904),  and  Joyzelle, 
The  Bluebird  and  Maria  Magdalene,  all  by 
A.  Teixeira  de  Mattos  in  1907,  1909  (with  an 
additional  act  1912)  and  1910  respectively. 

Ill 

EDMOND  ROSTAND 

WORKS  :  Les  Romanesques,  1894  >  ^a  Princesse 
lointaine,  1895;  La  Samaritaine,  1896;  Cyrano 
de  Bergerac,  1897;  L'Aiglon,  1900;  Chantecler, 
1910. 

TRANSLATIONS:  The  Romancers  (Les  Ro- 
manesques) is  translated  by  Mary  Hender 
(1899),  The  Princess  Faraway  (La  Princesse 
lointaine),  by  Charles  Renauld  (1899),  Cyrano 
de  Bergerac,  by  Gertrude  Hall  (1898),  by 
Gladys  Thomas  and  M.  F.  Guillement  (1900), 
by  Charles  Renauld  (1898),  and  by  H.  T. 
Kingsbury  (1898),  L'Aiglon,  by  L.  N.  Par- 
ker (1900),  and  Chantecler,  by  Gertrude  Hall 
(1900).  All  the  translations  deliberately  give 
up  the  poetry  of  Rostand  and  are  therefore  prac- 
tically worthless. 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY        321 

IV 

A.  GERHART  HAUPTMANN 

(See  Bibliography  of  Chapter  Three,  Section 

II.) 

B.  HUGO  VON  HOFMANNSTHAL 

CRITICISM  AND  BIOGRAPHY  :  In  addition  to  the 
criticism  of  Hofmannsthal  in  the  works  cited 
under  Chapter  Three,  consult  E.  Sulger-Gebing, 
Hugo  von  Hofmannsthal  (1905),  A.  Koll- 
mann,  Hugo  von  Hofmannsthal  (Vol.  47  of 
H.  Graef's  Beitrdge  zur  Liter  aturg  esc  hie  hte, 
1907),  and  Karl  Federn,  Essays  zur  Ver- 
gleichenden  Literaturgeschichte  (1904). 
WORKS:  Gestern,  1891;  Der  Tod  des  Tizian, 
1892;  Der  Tor  und  der  Tod,  1894;  Der  weisse 
Facher,  1898;  Theater  in  Versen,  1899,  con- 
taining: Die  Frau  am  Fenster,  1898,  Die 
Hochzeit  der  Sobeide,  1899,  and  Der  Aben- 
teurer  und  die  Sangerin,  1899;  Kleine  Dramen 
1906,  containing  Das  Bergwerk  zu  Falun,  1900, 
Der  Kaiser  und  die  Hexe,  1900,  and  Das 
Kleine  Welttheater,  1903;  Elektra,  1903;  Das 
gerettete  Venedig,  1905;  (Edipus  und  die 
Sphinx,  1905;  Cristinas  Heimreise,  1910;  Der 
Rosenkavalier,  1911  Jedermann,  1912;  Ari- 
adne auf  Naxos,  1912. 

TRANSLATIONS:  Death  and  the  Fool  (Der 
Tor  und  der  Tod)  is  translated  (after  a  fash- 
ion!) by  Max  Batt  (Poet  Lore,  1913),  Electra, 


322        CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

by  Arthur  Symons,  a  poet  of  equal  rank 
(1908).  A  version  of  The  Marriage  of  So- 
beide  (Die  Hochzeit  der  Sobeide),  by  B.  Q. 
Morgan  appears  in  Vol.  20  of  the  German 
Classics  of  the  XIX  and  XX  Centuries. 


A.  WILLIAM  BUTLER  YEATS 

WORKS:  The  Countess  Cathleen,  1890;  The 
Land  of  Heart's  Desire,  1894;  The  Shadowy 
Waters,  1900;  Cathleen  ni  Hoolihan,  1902; 
A  Pot  of  Broth,  1902;  Where  there  is  Noth- 
ing, 1903;  The  King's  Threshold,  1903;  The 
Hour  Glass,  1903;  On  Baile's  Strand,  1904; 
Deirdre,  1906;  The  Golden  Helmet,  1908;  The 
Green  Helmet,  1910. 

B.  LADY  A.  GREGORY 

WORKS:  Twenty-Five,  1903;  Spreading  the 
News,  1904;  Kincora,  1904;  The  White  Cock- 
ade, 1905;  Hyacinth  Halvey,  1906;  The  Gaol 
Gate,  1906;  The  Caravans,  1906;  The  Jack- 
daw, 1907;  The  Rising  of  the  Moon,  1907; 
Devorgilla,  1907 ;  The  Workhouse  Ward,  1908; 
The  Image,  1909;  The  Travelling  Man,  1910; 
The  Full  Moon,  1910;  Coats,  1910;  The  De- 
liverer, 1911;  MacDarragh's  Wife,  1912;  The 
Bogie  Man,  1912;  Darner's  Gold,  1912. 


CRITICAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY        323 

C.    JOHN  MILLINGTON  SYNGE 

WORKS:  In  the  Shadow  of  the  Glen,  1903; 
Riders  to  the  Sea,  1904;  The  Well  of  the 
Saints,  1905;  The  Playboy  of  the  Western 
World,  1907;  The  Tinker's  Wedding,  1909; 
Deirdre  of  the  Sorrows,  1910. 


INDEX 


Achurch,  Miss  Janet,  173. 

Age  difficile,  L',  90,  91,  94. 

Aglavaine  et  Selysette,  231. 

Agnes  Jordan,  141,  142,  144- 
146. 

Aiglon,  L',  242. 

Alladine    et    Palomides,    229- 
230,  230-231. 

Also  sprach  Zarathustra,  227, 
247. 

Amants,  95-97,  226. 

'Amour  brode,  L',  60. 

Amour euse,  48,  54-57. 

Anatol,  157,  159-160,  202. 

Ancey,  George,  45. 

And  Pippa  Dances,  257. 

Antoine,  Andre,  44,  45,  173. 

Archer,  William,  173,  182. 

\Ariane  et  Barbe-bleu,  231. 

ArUsienne,  L',  38. 

Arms  and  the  Man,  195. 

Arnold,  Matthew,  167,  201: 
The   Study    of    Celtic    Lit- 
erature, 274. 

Arthurian  legend,  249. 

As  You  Like  It,  237. 

Augier,  fimile,  34,  35,  65,  90, 

120,  169: 
Le  Oendre  de  M.  Poirier,  20. 

autre  Danger,  L',  95,  97-98. 

Avaries,  Les,  25,  75. 

'Aveugles,   Les,   232-233,   234, 
235. 


Bagatelle,  83,  88-89. 
Bahr,  Hermann,  163. 
Ballad  of  a  Nun,  231. 
Balzac,  Honore  de,  27: 

Contes  Drolatiques,  37. 
Bankruptcy,  A,  26. 
Barker,    Granville,    121,    174, 

202-207,  211,  218: 
The    Madras    House,    203- 

205,  206. 
The     Marrying     of     Anne 

Leete,  206. 
The      Voysey     Inheritance, 

206. 

Waste,  205-206,  206. 
Baudelaire,    Charles,    247. 
Beaver   Coat,    The,    113,    115, 

123,  126,  135. 
Becket,  171. 
Becque,     Henri,     39-44,     47, 

101,  173: 
Les    Corbeaux,   40,    41,   43, 

173. 

L'Enfant  prodigue,  40. 
Les  Honnetes  Femmes,  41. 
Michel  Pauper,  40. 
La  Navette,  41. 
La  Parisienne,  40,  43,   173. 
Before  Dawn,  110,   113,   125, 

126,  128. 

Belasco,  David,  175. 
Benefit    of    the    Doubt,    The, 
185. 


327 


INDEX 


Bennett,  Arnold: 

Milestones,  144. 
Berceau,  Le,  77-78. 
Bergson,  Henri,  8: 

Bergsonians,   197. 
Bergwerk  zu  Falun,  Das,  260, 

263. 
Bernstein,    Frau    Else     (See 

Rosmer,   Ernst). 
Bernstein,  Henri,  51. 
Beyerlein,   Adam,   163. 
Beyond  Our  Strength,  26. 
Bierbaum,   Otto  Julius: 

Ougeline,  249. 

Bjornson,    Bjornstjerne,  23- 
27: 

A  Bankruptcy,  26. 

Beyond  Our  Strength,  26. 

A  Gauntlet,  24,  25. 

The  King,  23. 

The  New  System,  9. 

The  Newly  Married  Couple, 

23. 

Blanchette,  48,  74r-75,  77. 
Blatter  fur  die  Kunst  (foot- 
note), 248. 

Blumenboot,  Das,  130,  133. 
Blumenthal,  Oscar,  103. 
Bourget,  Paul? 

Le  Disciple,  221. 
Bouton  de  Rose,  Le,  37. 
Bow  of  Odysseus,  The,  257. 
Braddon,  Mrs.  M.  E.,  181. 
Brahm,  Otto,  45,  46. 
Brand,  7,  9. 
Brgville,  Paul  de,  35. 
Brieux,    Eugene,    25,    45,    48, 
50,  51,  70-80,  90,  100,  149: 

Les  Avaries,  25,  75. 

Blanchette,  48,  74-75,  77. 

Le  Berceau,  77-78. 

Le  Couvfa,  78. 


Damaged   Goods    (see   Les 

A  varies). 
L'Engr6nage,  77. 
La  Frangaise,  92. 
La  Foi,  72-73. 
Les  Hannetons,  78,  79. 
Menages  d' Artistes,  48,   72, 

77. 

La  petite  Amie,  77,  78-79. 
Les  Remplaqantes,  74,  77. 
Re'sultat  des  Courses,  74. 
Browning,  Robert,  238. 
Brunetiere,  Ferdinand: 
La  Science  et   la  Religion, 

227. 
Buchse  der  Pandora,  Die,  150, 

153. 

Byron,  George  Gordon  Noel, 
146. 


Candida,  200. 

Capus,  Alfred,  51. 

Carlyle,  Thomas,  198. 

Case  of  Rebellious  Susan,  The, 
17&-180. 

Caste,  169-170. 

Catherine,  69. 

Cenci,  170. 

Chambers,  Robert  W.: 
The  Firing  Line,  174. 

Chance  de  Frangoise,  La,  53- 
54. 

Chantecler,  227,  236,  242-247, 
256,  275. 

Charlemagne's  Hostage,  257. 

Chaucer,  Goeffrey,  236. 

Cleopatra,  225. 

Collier,  Jeremy: 
Short    View   of  the  Immo- 
rality and  Profaneness  of 
the  English  Stage,  166. 


INDEX 


329 


Collins,  Wilkie,  174: 

The  Woman  in  White,  174. 
Colvin,  Sir  Sidney,  266. 
Comedie-Franqaise,  54,  64. 
Comedie  Marigny,  La,  98. 
Comrades,  28,  29-30,  31. 
Comte,  Atiguste,  8. 
Conflagration,  The,  125,  126. 
Congreve,  Thomas,  190. 
Connais-toi,  82,  83,  88,  101. 
Conies  Drolatiques,  37. 
Contemporains,  Les,  90. 
Corbeaux,  Les,  40,  41,  43,  173. 
Corneille,  246-247. 
Countess  Cathleen,  The,  271. 
Coup  d'Aile,  Le,  59-60. 
Course   du  Flambeau,  La,  5, 

82,  83,  84-86. 
Court  Theatre,  183. 
Courtelines,   Georges,  51. 
Couvee,  La,  78. 
Creditors,  28,  30,  31. 
Curel,  Fran£ois  de,  45,  48,  58- 
63: 

L' Armour  brode,  60. 

Le  Coup  d'Aile,  59-60. 

L'Envers   d'une   Sainte,   60. 

La  Figurante,  60. 

La  Fille  Sauvaae,  61. 

Les  Fossiles,  61-63. 

L'Invitee,  60. 
Custom  of  the  Country,  The, 

174. 

Cymbeline,  257. 
Cyrano  de  Bergerac,  236,  239- 
242. 

Damaged  Goods  (See  A  va- 
ries, Les). 

Ddmmerung,  135. 

Dance  of  the  Seven  Sins,  The, 
267. 


D'Annunzio,     Gabriele,     248, 

258. 

Darwin,  Charles,  224. 
Daudet,  Alphonse,  38-39,  104: 
L'Arlesienne,  38. 
Trente  Ans  de  Paris  (foot- 
note), 38. 
Davidson,  John: 

Ballad  of  a  Nun,  231. 
De  Dumas  a  Rostand   (foot- 
note), 50. 
Dedale,  Le,  77,  84. 
Depute  Leveau,  Le,  48,  91. 
Dervorgilla,  268. 
deux  Nobles ses,  Les,  64,  65- 

66. 

Dickens,  Charles,  113. 
Dies   Irae    (see    Poemes    an- 
tiques). 

Disciple,  Le,  221. 
Doll's  House,  A,   12,  19,  44, 

173. 
Donnay,  Maurice,  94f-99,  101, 

226: 

Amants,  95-97,  226. 
L'autre     Danger,     95,     97- 

98. 

Les  ficlaireuses,  95,  98-99. 
Dostoieffsky,   Feodor,  247. 
Drayman  Henschel,  114,  121, 

127,  250. 
Drei,  135,  139. 

drei  Reiherfedern,  Die.  249. 
Dreiser,  Theodore: 

Sister  Carrie,  174. 
Dreyer,  Max,  136,  139-141: 
Drei,  135,  139. 
Probekandidat,    140-141. 
Winterschlaf,  139-140. 
Dryden,    John,    89,    126,    166, 

246. 
Duel,  Le,  66,  103,  134. 


330 


INDEX 


Dumas  fils,  Alexander,  34,  90, 

129,  169. 
"Duchess,"  The,  183. 

ficlaireuses,  Les,  95,  98-99. 

Ehre,  Die,  128. 

einsame    Weg,  Der,   154,   155, 

161-162. 
Eldest  Son,  The,  169,  188,  203, 

209,  212,  216-217,  218,  226. 
Elektra,  22,  260,  263,  275. 
Eliot,  George: 

The  Mill  on  the  Floss,  126. 
Emperor  and  Galilean,  7. 
Enemy  of  the  People,  An,  13. 
Enfant  prodigue,  L',  40. 
Engrenage,  U,  77. 
finigme,  L't  89. 
Envers  d'une  Sainte,  L',  60. 
Erbforster,  Der,  169. 
Erdgeist,  153. 
Ernst,  Otto: 
Flachsmann    als     Erzieher, 

141. 
Erziehung  zur  Ehe,  Die,  147- 

148,  148. 
Es  lebe  das  Leben,  129,  130, 

132. 

Eucken,  Rudolf,  8,  276. 
Euclid,  81. 

Fabre,  Camille,  45. 

Familie  SeHcke,  Die,  106-110. 

Famille,   Una,  64. 

Father,  The,  28,  29,  32. 

Faust,  262. 

Faustus  and  Helen,  267. 

Fielding,  Henry,  105,  128. 

Figurante,  La,  60. 

Fille  Sauvage,  La,  61. 

Filon,  Augustin: 


De  Dumas  a  Rostand  (foot- 
note), 50. 

Firing  Line,  The,  174. 

Flachsmann  als  Erzieher,  141. 

Flaubert,  Gustave,  34,  128. 

Flipole,  91,  94. 

Foi,  La,  72-73. 

Fool  of  the  World,  The,  267. 

Forbes-Robertson,    Sir   John- 
stone,  183. 

Fossiles,  Les,  61-63. 

Fourteenth     Street     Theatre, 
182. 

Frangaise,  La,  92. 

France,  Anatole,   154: 
La  vie  litteraire,  224-225. 

Free  Stage  Society,  The,  45. 

Freiwild,  158,  159. 

Fromentin,  Eugene,  108. 

Friihlings  Erwachen,  150-152, 
153. 

Fugitive,  The,  209,  217,  218. 

Fulda,  Ludwig,  135,  247,  248, 

249: 

Die  Sklavin,  135. 
Talisman,  248. 
Das  verlorene  Paradis,  135. 

Gabriel  Schilling's  Flight,  116, 

252. 
Galsworthy,    John,    41,     101, 

111,    121,    174,    175,    176, 

177,  180,  202,  207-218,  266: 
The   Eldest    Son,    169,    188, 

203,    209,    212,     216-217, 

218,  226. 

The  Fugitive,  209,  217,  218. 
The    Inn    of    Tranquillity, 

207-208. 
Joy,  209. 
Justice,   209,   212,    213-214, 

218. 


INDEX 


331 


The  Little  Dream,  209. 

The   Pigeon,    75,   209,   215- 
216,  218. 

The   Silver   Box,   209,    212, 
218. 

Some  Platitudes  Concerning 
the  Drama,  207-208. 

Strife,  5,  209,  210-211,  212, 

213,  214-215,  218,  220. 
Oauntlet,  A,  24,  25. 
Gay  Lord  Quex,  The,  185. 
Gefdhrtin,  Die,  161. 
Gendre  de  M.  Poirier,  Le,  20. 
George,  Stephan,  258. 
Georgian  period,  170. 
Georges  Dandin,  257. 
Getting  Married,  192,  196,  200. 
gerettete   Venedig,  Das,  263. 
Gestern,  262. 
Ghosts,  5,  13,  18,  19,  20,  32,  44, 

45,  173. 

Gilbert,  W.  S.,  168. 
Goethe,  109,  146,  250: 

Faust,  262. 

Goncourt,  Edmond  de,  35. 
Goncourts,  The,  34-35, 46,  104: 

Henriette  Marechal,  35. 
Gosson,  Stephen: 

School  of  Abuse,  166. 
Gout  du  Vice,  Le,  66,  70. 
Green  Carnation,  The,  191. 
Gregory,  Lady,  267,  272-273: 

Dervorgilla,  268. 
Griselda,  257. 
Gugeline,  249. 
gute  Ruf,  Der,  130,  133. 

Halbe,   Max,   109,   136-139: 
Die  Insel  der  Seligen,  249. 
Jugend,   135,   136-137. 
Mutter  Erde,  137-138. 
Der  Strom,  138^139,  139. 


Das    tausendjahrige   Reich, 

138. 

Hamlet,  22,  230. 
Manna  Jagert,  135,  149. 
Hannele,  250-251. 
Hannetons,  Les,  78,  79. 
Hanska,  Mme.,  27. 
Harden,  Maximilian,  45. 
Hardy,  Thomas,  174. 
Hare,  John,  183. 
Hartleben,    Otto    Erich,    135, 

146-149,   159: 
Die     Erziehung     zur     Ehe, 

147-148,   148. 
Hanna  Jagert,  135,  149. 
Rosenmontag,  148. 
Harvesters,  The,  267. 
Hauptmann,   Gerhart,  28,  41, 
46,  109,  110-128,  135,  140, 
141,    154,    159,    174,    175, 
202,    210,    211,    218,    236, 
249,  250-257: 
And  Pippa  Dances,  257. 
The  Beaver  Coat,  113,  115, 

123,  126,  135. 
Before  Dawn,  110,  113,  125, 

126,  128. 

The  Bow  of  Odysseus,  257. 
Charlemagne's          Hostage1, 

257. 

The  Conflagration,  125,  126. 
Drayman     Henschel,      114, 

121,  127,  250. 
Gabrwl    Schilling's    Flight, 

116,  252. 
Griselda,  257. 
Hannele,  250-251. 
Henry    of    Aue,    165,    227, 

241,  254-257,  275. 
Lonely     Lives,     113,     114, 
115,  117-120,  124,  127,  135, 


332 


INDEX 


The  Maidens  of  the  Mount, 

122. 

Michael   Kramer,   113,   114, 
116-117,     125,     127,     226, 
250. 
The  Rats,  122-123,  124-125, 

127. 
The  Reconciliation,  113,  115, 

121,  126,  135. 
Rose  Bernd,  5,  114,  116,  121, 

129,  203,  220,  250. 
The   Sunken  Bell,  251-254, 

257. 

The  Weavers,  22,  45,  114, 
115,  124,  125,  127,  135, 
250. 

Hazlitt,  William,  170. 
Heart     of    Midlothian,     The, 

126. 
Hebbel,  Friedrich: 

Maria  Magdalena,  169. 
Hebraism,  147. 
Hedda  Oabler,  15,  19. 
Heimat,  128,  130. 
Hellenism,  147. 
Henriette  Marechal,  35. 
Henry  of  Aue,  165,  227,  241, 

254-257,  275. 

Heritiers  Rabourdin,  Les,  37. 
Herod,  266. 
Hervieu,  Paul,  24,  51,  80-89, 

101,   108,   112,   132,   175: 
Bagatelle,  83,  88-89. 
Connais-toi,  82,  83,  88,  101. 
La  Course  du  Flambeau,  5, 

82,  83,  84-86. 
Le  Dedale,  77,  84. 
L'Gnigme,  89. 
Le  Loi  de  I'homme,  86-88. 
Les  Paroles  restent,  48,  81, 

84. 
Le  Rtveil,  82,  83,  88. 


Les  Tenailles,  86-88. 
Theroigne     de     Mericourt, 

89. 

Heyse,  Paul,  247. 
Hichens,  Robert: 

The  Green  Carnation,  191. 
Hirschfeld,    Georg,    41,    109, 

136,  141-146,  210: 
Agnes    Jordan,     141,     142, 

144-146. 

Der  junge  Ooldner,  141. 
Die  Mutter,  141,  143-144. 
Spdtfruhling,  141. 
Der    Weg   zum  Licht,   141, 

249. 
Zu   Hause,    135,   141,   142- 

143. 
Hochzeit    der    Sobeide,    Die, 

263. 

Hofmannsthal,  Hugo  von,  222, 
223,    236,   249,   256,   257- 
265: 
Das    Bergwerk    zu    Falun, 

260,  263. 

Elektra,  22,  260,  263,  275. 
Das  gerettete  Venedig,  263. 
Gestern,  262. 
Die   Hochzeit   der  Sobeide, 

263. 
Der  Kaiser  und  die  Hexe, 

260. 
Odipus     und     die     Sphinx, 

260,  263,  264-265. 
Der  Tor  und  der  Tod,  226, 

262-263. 

Das  weisse  Facher,  263. 
Holmsen,  Bjarne  P.,  106. 
Holz,  Arno,  105-110,  112, 

114: 

Traumulus,  141. 
Honnetes  Femmes,  Les,  41. 
Hovey,  Richard,  228. 


INDEX 


333 


Ibsen,  Henrik,  7-33,  46,  104, 
107,    111,    117,    118,    121, 
174,  184,  247: 
Brand,  7,  9. 
A  Doll's  House,  12,  19,  44, 

173. 

Emperor  and  Galilean,  7. 
An  Enemy  of  the  People, 

13. 
Ghosts,  5,  13,  18,  19,  20,  32, 

44,  45,  173. 
Hedda  Gabler,  15,  19. 
John,  Gabriel  Borkman,  15- 

16,  18,  19. 

The  Lady  from  the  Sea,  14. 
The  League  of  Youth,  8,  9. 
Little  Eyolf,  15,  18. 
The    Master    Builder,    14, 

15. 

Peer  Gynt,  7. 
Pillars    of    Society,    9,    12, 

18,  19. 
Rosmersholm,    13,    14,    19, 

117-120. 
When  We  Dead  Awaken,  8, 

16. 

Ideas  of  Good  and  Evil,  268. 
Ideal  Husband,  An,  190,  191, 

192. 

Iliad:,  109. 
Illusion    supreme,    L',     (See 

Poemes  tragiques). 
Importance  of  Being  Earnest, 

The,   192. 
Independent  Theatre,  46,  173, 

184. 
Inn  of  Tranquillity,  The,  207- 

208. 

Insel  der  Seligen,  Die,  249. 
Insel,  Die    (footnote),  248. 
Intfrieur,    L',    232,    233,    234, 
235, 


Intruse,  L',  232,  235. 
Invitee,  L',  60. 
Iris,   186-187,   188. 

Jadis  et  naguere,  222. 
James,  William,  8: 

The  Will  to  Believe,  227. 
Jeffrey,  Francis,  151. 
Jerschke,  Otto: 

Traumulus,   141. 
jeune  Belgique,  La,  228. 
Jeunes,  Les,  64. 
Johannes,  249. 
Johannisfeuer,  131. 
John  Gabriel  Borkman,  15-16, 

18,  19. 

Jones,    Henry    Arthur,     132, 
173,     174,     175,     177-182, 
183: 
The     Case     of     Rebellious 

Susan,  178-180. 
Michael  and  His  Lost  An- 
gel, 179,  180-182. 
The  Renascence  of  the  Eng- 
lish Drama,  177. 
The  Triumph  of  the  Philis- 
tines, 178. 
Jonson,  Ben,  273. 
Joy,  209. 

Jugend,  135,  136-137. 
Jullien,  Jean,  4*5. 
junge  Goldner,  Der,  141. 
Justice,  209,  212,  213-214,  218. 

Kahn,  Gustave,  228. 

Kaiser   und   die   Hexe,   Der9 

260. 

Keats,  John,  258. 
King,  The,  23. 
King's    Threshold,    The,    226, 

271-272,  275. 
Klein,  Charles,  176. 


334 


INDEX 


Knoblauch,  Edward: 

Milestones,  144. 
Knowles,  Sheridan,  170. 
Konigskinder,  249. 
Korrektionsanstalt,  152. 
Kotzebue,  A.  F.  F.  von,  128. 


Lady  from  the  Sea,  The,  14. 

Lady  of  Lyons,  169. 

Lady  Windermere's  Fan,  189, 

192. 

Lamb,  Charles  (footnote),  190, 
Land  of  Heart's  Desire,  The, 

271. 
Lavedan,    Henri,    63-70,    90, 

132,  134: 
Catherine,  69. 
Les  deux  Noblesses,  64,  65- 

66. 

Le  Duel,  66,  103,  134. 
Une  Famille,  64. 
Le  Gout  du  Vice,  66,  70. 
Les  Jeunes,  64. 
Leur  Beau  Physique,  64. 
Leur   Coeur,   64. 
Leur  Soeurs,  64. 
Le  Lit,  64. 
Les  Marionettes,  64. 
Le  Marquis  de  Priola,  66. 
Le  nouveau  Jeu,  66,  67,  68- 

69. 

Les  Petites  Visites,  64. 
Le  Prince  d'Aurec,  48,  64*- 

65. 

Sire,  69-70. 
Le  vieux  Marcheurt  66,  67, 

69. 

Viveurs,  66,  67,  68. 
League  of  Youth,  The,  8,  9. 
Lear,  2,  109,  257. 
Lebendige  Stunden,  155,  161. 


Lemaitre,   Jules,   90-94,    101, 
108,  112: 

L'Age  Difficile,  90,  91,  94. 

Les  Contemporains,  90. 

Le  Depute  Leveau,  48,  91. 

FUpote,  91,  94. 

Marriage  blanc,  94. 

Revolt^e,  90,  91. 
Lessing,     Gotthold    Ephraim, 

169. 

Lessing   Theatre,    128. 
Letty,  187. 

Leur  Beau  Physique,  64. 
Leur  Coeur,  64. 
Leur  Soews,  64. 
Liebelei,  156-157,  160-161. 
Lindau,  Paul,  103,  175,  177. 
Link,  The,  28,  31. 
Lisle,  Leconte  de,  222: 

Poemes  antiques,  222. 

Poemes    tragiques,    222. 
Lit,  Le,  64. 

Little  Dream,  The,  209. 
Little  Eyolf,  15,  18. 
Loi  de  I'homme,  Le,  86-88. 
Lonely   Lives,    113,   114,    115, 
117-120,     124,     127,     135, 
252. 
Lover  of  the  Queen  of  Sheba, 

The,  267. 
Lucian,  201. 
Ludwig,  Otto: 

Der  Erbforster,  169. 
Lytton,  E.  G.  E.  Lytton  Bul- 
wer-: 

Lady  of  Lyons,  169. 

Money,  169. 

Macbeth,  2,  230. 
Madame   B ovary,    100-101. 
Madras  House,  The,  203-205, 
206. 


INDEX 


335 


Maeterlinck,      Maurice,      222, 

228-235,  236,  248: 
Aglavaine  et  Selysette,  231. 
Alladine  et  Palomides,  229- 

230,  230-231. 

Ariane  et  Barbe-bleu,  231. 
Les       Aveugles,       232-233, 

234,  235. 
L'Interieur,    232,    233,    234, 

235. 

L'lntruse,  232,  235. 
Marie  Madeleine,  233—234. 
Monna      Vanna,      228-220, 

233. 
La  Mort  de  Tintagiles,  230, 

231-232. 

L'Oiseau  bleu,  234-235. 
PelUas    et    Mtlisande,    230, 

231. 

Princesse  Maleine,  228,  230. 
Les  Sept  Princesses,  231. 
Soeur  Beatrice,  228,  231. 
Magistrate,   The,  183. 
Maidens  of   the  Mount,   The, 

122. 

Major  Barbara,  200. 
Mallarme,   Sttphane,   222. 
3/cm  awe?  Superman,  196,  200. 
Mdrchen,  Das,   135,   158-159. 
Maria  Magdalena,  169. 
Marie   Madeleine,  233-234. 
Marquis  de  Priola,  Le,  66. 
Marriage  blanc,  94w 
Marionettes,  Les,  64. 
Marrying  of  Anne  Leete,  The, 

206. 

Mart/  Stuart,  170. 
Master     Builder,      The,      14, 

15. 

Maupassant,  Guy  de,  39: 
Musotte,  39. 
Za  Paia;  cfa*  Manage,  39. 


Meister  Oelze,  135. 

Menages    d' Artistes,    48,     72, 

77. 
Michael  and  His  Lost  Angel, 

179,  180-182. 
Michael     Kramer,     113,     114, 

116-117,     125,     127,     226, 

250. 

Michel  Pauper,  40. 
Might  of  Darkness,  The,  45. 
Milestones,  144. 
3ft«  on  £/ie  F/<m,   Tfte,  126. 
Milton,  John,  246. 
".MwcZ   £A0   Paw£"   Girl,   The, 

134,  168,  187-188. 
Misanthrope,  Le,  22,  257. 
1/m  Julia,  28,  29,  32. 
If ob,  The   (footnote),  209. 
Moliere,  36,  70,  175,  176,  201, 

240,  257,  273: 
Georges   Dandin,  257. 
Le  Misanthrope,  22,  257. 
Monna  Vanna,  228-229,  233. 
Moreas,  Jean,  228. 
Morituri,  131. 
Mort   de   Tintagiles,  La,  230, 

231-232. 
Mozart,   Wolfgang   Amadeus, 

160. 

Money,  169. 

Mrs.   Wiggs  of  the  Cabbage- 
Patch,  174. 
Musotte,  39. 
Musset,  Alfred  de: 
Soiree  perdu®,  33. 
Mutter,  Die,  141,  143-144. 
Mutter    Erde,    137-138. 


Navette,  La,  41. 

New  Garrick  Theatre,  183. 

New  System,  The,  9. 


336 


INDEX 


Newly  Married  Couple,  The, 

33. 

Nietzsche,   Friedrich,   247: 
Also     sprach     Zarathustra, 

227,  247. 
Notorious      Mrs.      Ebbsmith, 

The,  185. 
nouveau  Jen,  Le,  66,  67,  68- 

69. 
Noyes,  Alfred,  266. 

(Edipus  the  King,  2,  4. 

CEhlenschlager,    7. 

Ode   to   the  Sun   (See  Chan- 

tecler). 
Odeon,  48. 
Odipus  und  die  Sphinx,  260, 

263,  264r-265. 
Oiseau  bleu,  L',  234-235. 
Othello,  2,  4. 
Otho,  267. 
Otway,  Thomas: 

Venice  Preserved,  263. 

Paix  du  Menage,  La,  39. 
Pan   (footnote),  248. 
Paolo  and  Francesca,  266. 
Paracelsus,  249. 
Pardon,  Le,   91-93. 
Parisienne,  La,  40,  43,  173. 
Parnassian  school,  222. 
Paroles   restent,  Les,   48,  81, 

84. 

Passe,  Le,  57,  101. 
Peer  Oynt,  7. 

PelUas  et  Melisande,  230,  231. 
petite  Amie,  La,  77,  78-79. 
Petites  Visites,  Les,  64. 
Phillips,  Stephen,  266: 

Herod,  266. 

Paolo  and  Francesca,  266. 

Ulysses,  266. 


Pigeon,  The,  75,  209,  215-216, 

218. 
Pillars   of  Society,  9,  12,   18, 

19. 

Pinero,     Sir     Arthur    Wing, 
10,  112,  134,  173,  174,  182- 
189: 
The  Benefit  of  the  Doubt, 

185. 

The  Gay  Lord  Quex,  185. 
Iris,  186-187,  188. 
Letty,  187. 
The  Magistrate,   183. 
"Mind  the  Paint"  Girl,  The, 

134,  168,  187-188. 
The    Notorious    Mrs.    Ebb- 
smith,  185. 

The  Profligate,  183-184,  189. 
The   Second   Mrs.    Tanque- 

ray,  184-185. 
Sweet  Lavender,   183. 
The  Thunderbolt,  187. 
A    Wife    Without   a  Smile, 

187. 
Playboy      of      the      Western 

World,   The,  273-274. 
Poemes  antiques,  222. 
Poemes   tragiques,  222. 
Poppcea,  267. 
Porto-Riche,  Georges  de,  52- 

57,  95,   101: 
Amoureuse,  48,  54-57. 
Le  Chance  de  Frangoise,  53- 

54. 

Le  Passe,  57,  101. 
Thedtre  d' Amour,  52. 
vieil  homme,  Le,  57. 
Pragmatism,  197,  276. 
Prince    d'Aurec,   Le,   48,    64- 

65. 

Princesse   lointaine,  La,  238- 
239,  241. 


INDEX 


337 


Princesse    Maleine,    La,    228, 

230. 

Probekandidat,  140-141. 
Profligate,  The,  183-184,  189. 
Promise  of  May,  The,  171-172. 


Racine,  225. 

Hats,  The,  122-123,  124-125, 
127. 

Reade,  Charles,  168. 

Reconciliation,  The,  113,  115, 
121,  126,  135. 

Rejane,  Mme.,  54. 

Remplagantes,  Les,  74,  77. 

Renaissance,  233,  248,  249. 

Renascence  of  the  English 
Drama,  The,  177. 

Restoration,  166. 

Resultat  des  Courses,  74. 

Rtveil,  Le,  82,  83,  88. 

Rtvoltee,  90,  91. 

Rice,  Alice  Hegan: 
Mrs.  Wiggs  of  the  C  abb  age- 
Patch,  174. 

Riders  to  the  Sea,  274. 

Robertson,    Thomas    William, 

120-121,  168,  169-170: 
Caste,  169-170. 

Robertson,  Sir  Johnstone 
Forbes  (See  Forbes- 
Robertson,  Sir  John- 
stone)  . 

Rod,  Edouard,  221. 

Romanesques,  Les,  237-238. 

Romeo  and  Juliet,  95,  96,  237. 

Rose  Bernd,  5,  114,  116,  121, 
129,  203,  220,  250. 

Rosenmontag,  148. 

Rosmer,  Ernst: 
Ddmmerung,  135,  136. 
Konigskinder,  249. 


Rosmersholm,  13,  14,  19,  117- 

120. 
Rostand,     Edmond,     236-247, 

256: 

L'Aiglon,  242. 
Chantecler,    227,    236,    242- 

247,  256,  275. 
Cyrano    de    Bergerac,    236, 

239-242. 
La  Princesse  lointaine,  238- 

239,  241. 

Les  Romanesques,  237-238. 
La  Samaritaine,  239. 
Rubens,  Peter  Paul,  108. 
Ruf  des  Lebens,  Der,  161,  162. 
Rutherford  and  Son,  175. 

Sagesse,  222. 
Saint  Francis,  225. 
Samaritaine,  La,  239. 
Sarcey,  Francisque,  48. 
Sardou,  Victor ien,  103,  175. 
Schiller,  107,  169,  247: 

Wallenstein,  2. 

Schlaf,    Johannes     (See    also 
Holz,   Arno.),   105-110: 

Meister  Oelze,  135.  tJ 
Schleier    der    Beatrice,    Der, 

249. 

Schlenther,  Paul,  45. 
Schmetterlingsschlacht,       Die, 

13O-131. 

Schnitzler,    Arthur,    109,    135. 
154-163,  175,  218: 

Anatol,  157,  159-160,  202. 

Der  einsame  Weg,  154,  155, 
161-162. 

Freiwild,  158,  159. 

Die  Gefdhrtin,  161. 

Lebendige  Stunden,  155,  161. 

Liebelei,  156-157,  160-161. 

Das  Mdrchen,  135,  158-159. 


338 


INDEX 


Paracelsus,  249. 

Der  Ruf  des  Lebens,   161, 

163. 
Der   Schleier   der  Beatrice, 

249. 

Das   Vermachtnis,  158,  159. 
Das  weite>  Land,  154,  157. 
Zwischenspiel,  155. 
Schoenherr,  Karl,  104. 
School  of  Abuse,  166. 
Scott,  Walter: 

The    Heart    of    Midlothian, 

126, 
Science    et    la    Religion,    La, 

227. 
Scribe,    Eugene,    33,    34,    49, 

103. 
Second  Mrs.  Tanqueray,  The, 

184r-185. 

Sept  Princesses,  Les,  231. 
Shadowy  Waters,  The,  268. 
Shakespeare,   2,   96,   166,   170, 

171,  175,  176,  257: 
As  You  Like  It,  237. 
Cymbeline,  257. 
Hamlet,  22,  230. 
Lear,  2,  109,  257. 
Macbeth,  2,  230. 
Othello,  2,  4. 
Romeo   and  Juliet,   95,   96, 

237. 

Troilus  and  Cressida,  237. 
Shaw,    George    Bernard,    46, 
70-71,   76,   121,    147,    149, 
182,  184,  191,  192-202,  202, 
211,  218: 

Arms  and  the  Man,  195. 
Candida,  200. 
Getting   Married,    192,    196, 

200. 
Mayor  Barbara,  200. 


Man    and    Superman,,    196, 
200. 

The  Shewing  Up  of  Blanco 
Posnet,  200. 

Widowers'  Houses,  173. 

You  Never  Can  Tell,  200. 
Shelley,  Percy  Bysshe: 

Cenci,  170. 
Sheridan,    Richard     Brinsley, 

166. 
Shewing  Up  of  Blanco  Posnet, 

The,  200. 

Short  View  of  the  Immorality 
and    Profaneness    of    the 
English  Stage,  166. 
Silver  Box,  The,  209,  212,  218. 
Sire,  69-70. 
Sister  Carrie,  174. 
Sklavin,  Die,  135. 
Sodoms  Ende,  130. 
Soeur  Beatrice,  228,  231. 
Soiree  perdue,  33. 
Some    Platitudes    Concerning 

the  Drama,  207-208. 
Sophocles,  175: 

Sophoclean  choruses,  264. 
Sowerby,  Githa: 

Rutherford  and  Son,  175. 
Spatfruhling,  141. 
Spencer,  Herbert,  8,  197. 
Stein  unter  Steinen,  133. 
Strandkinder,  133. 
Strife,    5,   209,   210-211,    212, 

213,    214-215,    218,    220. 
Strindberg,  August,  27-33: 

Comrades,  28,  29-30,  31. 

Creditors,  28,  29,  31. 

The  Father,  28,  29,  32. 

The  Link,  28,  31. 

Miss  Julia,  28,  29,  32. 
Strom,  Derf  138-139,  139. 


INDEX 


339 


Study    of    Celtic    Literature, 

The,  274. 
Sturmgeselle    Sokrates,    Der, 

132,  133. 
Sudermann,     Hermann,     128- 

134,  159,  233: 
Das  Blumenboot,  130,  133. 
Die  drei  Reiherfedern,  249. 
Die  Ehre,  128. 
Es  lebe  das  Leben,  129,  130, 

132. 

Der  gute  Ruf,  130,  133. 
Heimat,  128,  130. 
Johannes,  249. 
Johannisfeuer,   131. 
Morituri,  131. 
Die    Schmetterlingsschlacht, 

130-131. 

Sodoms  Ende,  130. 
Stein  unter  Steinen,  133. 
Strandkinder,  133. 
Der  Sturmgeselle  Sokrates, 

132,  133. 
Sunken    Bell,    The,    251-254, 

257. 

Sweet  Lavender,  183. 
Swinburne,  Algernon  Charles, 

248,  258: 
Mary  Stuart,  170. 
Symbolists,  222-225. 
Syrnons,   Arthur,  267: 

The    Dance    of    the    Seven 

Sins,  267. 

Faustus  and  Helen,  267. 
The  Fool  of  the  World,  267. 
The  Harvesters,  267. 
The  Lover  of  the  Queen  of 

Sheba,  267. 
Otho,  267. 
Poppcea,  267. 
Tristan  and  Iseult,  267. 


•S'ynge,  John  Millington,  267, 

273-274: 
The  Playboy  of  the  Western 

World,  273^274. 
Riders  to  the  Sea,  274. 
The  Tinker's  Wedding,  273. 

Talisman,  248. 

tausendjahrige     Reich,     Das, 
138. 

Taylor,  Tom,  168. 

Tenailles,  Les,  86-88. 

Tennyson,  Lord  Alfred,  171- 

172,  266: 
Becket,  171. 

The  Promise  of  May,  171- 
172. 

Terre,  La,  221. 

Thackeray,     William     Make- 
peace, 128. 

Theatre  d' Amour,  52. 

Theatre  Libre,  44,  45-46,  47, 
48,  53,  72,  173. 

Therese  Raquin,  37. 

Theroigne  de  M6ricourt,  89. 

Thunderbolt,  The,  187. 

Tinker's  Wedding,  The,  273. 

Tolstoi,  Count  Leo,  46,  247: 
The    Might    of    Darkness, 
45. 

Tor  und  der  Todf  Der,  226, 
262-263. 

Traumulus,  141. 

T rente    ans    de    Paris    (foot- 
note), 38. 

Tristan  and  Isemlt,  267. 

Triumph    of    the    Philistines, 
The,  178. 

Troilus  and  Cressida,  237. 

Ulysses,  266. 


34° 


INDEX 


Vaudeville,  48. 
Venice  Preserved,  263. 
Verein  Freie  Biihne,  45. 
Verhaeren,  Emile,  228. 
Verlaine,  Paul,  74, 222-223, 248 : 

Jadis  et  naguere,  222. 

Sagesse,  222. 

verlorene  Paradis,  Das,  135. 
Vermdchtnis,  Das,   158,   159. 
Victorian  age,  170. 
vie  litttraire,  La,  224-225. 
vieil  homme,  Le,  57. 
Viete-Griffin,    Francis,    228. 
vieux  Marcheur,  Le,  66,  67,  69. 
Viveurs,  66,  67,  68. 
Voysey  Inheritance,  The,  206. 

Waste,  205-206,  206. 
Weavers,  The,  22,  45,  114,  115, 

124,  125,  127,  135,  250. 
Wedekind.  Frank,   149-153: 
Die    Biichse    der    Pandora, 

150,  153. 
Erdgeirt,  153. 
Fruhligs     Erwachen,     150- 

152,  153. 

Korrektionsanstalt,    152. 
Weg  zum  Licht,  Der,  141,  249. 
weisse  Facher,  Der,  263. 
weite  Land,  Das,  154j  157. 
Wharton,  Edith: 

The  Custom  of  the  Country, 

174. 

When   We  Dead  Awaken,  8, 16. 
Where  There  Is  Nothing,  270- 

271. 

Widowers'  Houses,   173. 
Wife  Without  a  Smile,  A,  187. 
Wilbrandt,  Adolf,  247. 
Wild  Duck,  The,  8,  13. 


Wilde,    Oscar,    112,    180-193,  V 

248,  262: 
An  Ideal  Husband,  190,  191, 

192. 
The    Importance    of    Being 

Earnest,  192. 
Lady     Windermere's     Fan, 

189,  192. 

A    Woman    of   No    Impor- 
tance, 190,  191. 
Wildenbruch,  Ernst  von,  103. 
Will  to  Believe,  The,  227. 
Wilson,  Bishop,  24. 
Winterschlaf,  139-140. 
Wolff,  Theodor,  45. 
Woman  in  White,  The,  174. 
Woman  of  No  Importance,  A: 

190,  191. 
Wordsworth,  William,  151, 246. 

Yeats,  William  Butler,  222, 
223,  225,  236,  256,  267, 
269-270: 

Countess  Cathleen,  26?. 
Ideas  of  Good  and  Evil,  271. 
The  King's   Threshold,  226, 

271-272,  274. 

The   Land   of  Hearts   De- 
sire, 271. 

The  Shadowy  Waters,  268. 
Where    There    Is    Nothing, 

27(X-271. 
You  Never  Can  Tell,  200. 

Zola,  fimile,  35-37,  46,  104, 
153,  220-247: 

Le  Bouton  de  Rose,  37. 

Les  Heritiers  Rabourdin,  37. 

La  Terre,  221. 

TMrese  Raquin,  37. 
Zu  Hause,  135,  141,  142-143. 
Zwischenspiel,  155. 


IOAN  DEPT. 

!    rlnn.    ^._     .1 


^£C'D  LD 


^D  21A-50m.4,'59 
(Al724slO)476B 


Uni^nerai  Library 
Berkeley  * 


LD  21-100m-2,'55 
(B139s22)476 


U.C.  BERKELEY  LIBRARIES 


CD3flSMD773 


YB  14.739 


